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bio »  Magny-Cours: 12-Core Computing Arrives  As expected, this
morning AMD announced that it was shipping the Opteron 6100
family, a line of 8- and 12-core processors that has been
referred to as Magny-Cours.  This chip family is aimed at
servers, but what makes it particularly interesting is that it
has the largest number of cores in a single x86 architecture
chip available to date. A number of server makers, including,
Acer, Cray, Dell, HP, and SGI have announced support for the
chip.  The Opteron 6100 family of chips are 45nm processors that
start with a 2-GHz, 8-core version known at the 6128 that uses
80 watts of what AMD called "average CPU power" and has a list
price of $266 (in quantities of $1,000 , as processor list
prices are usually quoted.) It goes up to a 2.3-GHz 12-core
version that uses 105 watts, with a list price of $1,386. In
between are a number of other 8- and 12-core versions, including
three "high efficiency" models that