News - AMD Opteron 6300 - Up to 16 cores of Piledriver

[HEXUS]

AMD enters Piledriver into the server market, where it has traditionally performed best.

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[Zanny]

Sometimes server processors drive me nuts. Any IT department ordering server parts would just use commodity FX chips with SAS PCI raid controllers. Charging 1k for a processor is so silly.

[scaryjim]

... Any IT department ordering server parts would just use commodity FX chips with SAS PCI raid controllers. ...

How many FX processors can you put in one motherboard? There's more to these chips than just being standard FX dies on a different substrate.

[kingpotnoodle]

Sometimes server processors drive me nuts. Any IT department ordering server parts would just use commodity FX chips with SAS PCI raid controllers. Charging 1k for a processor is so silly.

Errrm no. And there is a 16 core chip there for $703, that's £440 + VAT (and in business VAT is often forgettable in the costing). There are no 16 core FX chips, and £440 isn't much more per core/MHz than an FX.

Most IT departments will buy servers from HP, Dell, IBM or Fujitsu etc because they need the warranty cover and for production equipment and the 24x7 SLA on part replacements. These systems are rarely ATX standard, you can't get FX CPUs in kits with a 1U passive cooler, they're not validated to be covered by warranty, use different sockets, don't support ECC buffered RAM etc etc etc

Sure if you're building some dev box you could knock it together using an FX, desktop mobo and plain RAM, but you'd be chancing it for a production system. I wouldn't run anything I needed uptime on like that.

There are many things above cost in the priority list. A few hundred quid is likely peanuts compared to the salaries of the staff whose time would be wasted during downtime.

[DDY]

It's a shame socket G34 and C32 boards are so expensive Also, that 16 core 3000 series PD Opterons probably won't happen due to the limitations of socket AM3+.