AMD finally announced that it is shipping its Bulldozer-based Interlagos CPUs to vendors through a press release. One may have missed the short press release, especially given that AMD still only lists the Opteron 6100 series Magny-cours chips on their product page. It appears as though the chips are shipping only to OEMs (such as Cray) and other partners right now, but they will be trickling down to the retail market sometime in October.
The market and AMDs investors are certainly looking at the Interlagos launch with great interest. Although AMD has a unique value proposition on the low-end, integrating CPU and better-than-Intel GPUs for lower cost PCs, at the high-end AMD has ruled core counts albeit with an older architecture and manufacturing process. With a 16-core CPU that has AES acceleration and a new 32nm process, the Opteron 6200 series is going to be a major step forward. Finally, AMD has a chance to be highly competitive with Intel (at least until Intel’s new 22nm offerings appear.)
Again, the Opteron 6200 series should work in current single, dual and quad socket motherboards with a simple BIOS flash. One may need a new motherboard to enable 1600MHz memory operation.
