AMD Now Shipping 12-Core Processors [AMD's Mangy-Cours High-End Server CPU Now Shipping To Partners, 16-core Processor Coming, 48-core Processor Hinted At]

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AMD confirmed via their company blog that they have begun shipping their “Magny-Cours” multi-core processors to certain computer manufacturers. These processors are packing either 8- or 12-cores and they’re server-grade processors. AMD also gave a hint of what was to come, including a 48-core processor.

AMD’s Magny-Cours processor is (in layman’s terms) two of their six-core Istanbul processors on the same chip. Website Hot Hardware speculates that since AMD doesn’t have any native eight-core architecture platforms, the 8-core variant of the Magny-Cours processor has two of its combined 12-cores disabled.

The Magny-Cours has aimed its sights at Intel’s 6-core Westmere Xeon processors, which are the current champs in the high-end server space. Pundits speculate that this new AMD Magny-Cours has enough horsepower and bandwidth to give the Xeons a run for their money. The Magny-Cours will be running on AMD’s Maranello platform, which’ll use the LGA slot and will support four channels of DDR3 RAM.

AMD plans to offer chipsets and processors for their Maranello platform until 2012, although they did not that the platform’s chipsets will have compatibility for 48-core processors. It’s unlikely we’ll see 48-core processors (outside of a lab) before 2012, but it’s interesting to consider a 48-core processor.

AMD does, however, have plans to build a 16-core processor before the year 2012. It’s unlikely that the processor will be natively 16-cores, how they plan to do it with their “Interlagos” processors remains to be seen.

Pricing for the Magny-Cours processors is being negotiated with each partner, no word has been released to the public on how much the going rate is, but you can imagine they’re expensive.