AMD Releases Opteron 4200 "Valencia" and 6200 "Interlagos" Series
by Kristian Vättö on November 14, 2011 12:50 PM ESTAMD launched Bulldozer about a month ago, but the initial CPUs were only for desktops. As a follow up, AMD has today released the server variants of Bulldozer. There are a total of 18 CPUs launching today, and they are branded as Opteron 4200 and 6200 series, although some of you may be more familiar with the codenames "Valencia" and "Interlagos". AMD actually began the shipments of 4200 and 6200 series in September but the lineup was not officially released until today. Below is a specification table.
| AMD Opteron 4200 and 6200 Series Specifications | |||||||
| Series | Model number | Core/Thread Count | Frequency | Max Turbo | L3 Cache | TDP | Price |
| 4200 series "Valencia" | 4226 | 6/6 | 2.7GHz | 3.1GHz | 8MB | 95W | $125 |
| 4228 HE | 6/6 | 2.8GHz | 3.6GHz | 8MB | 65W | $255 | |
| 4234 | 6/6 | 3.1GHz | 3.5GHz | 8MB | 95W | $174 | |
| 4238 | 6/6 | 3.4GHz | 3.7GHz | 8MB | 95W | $255 | |
| 4256 EE | 8/8 | 1.6GHz | 2.8GHz | 8MB | 35W | $377 | |
| 4274 HE | 8/8 | 2.6GHz | 3.5GHz | 8MB | 65W | $377 | |
| 4280 | 8/8 | 2.8GHz | 3.5GHz | 8MB | 95W | $255 | |
| 4284 | 8/8 | 3.3GHz | 3.7GHz | 8MB | 95W | $316 | |
| 6200 series "Interlagos" | 6204 | 4/4 | 3.3GHz | N/A | 16MB | 115W | $405 |
| 6212 | 8/8 | 2.6GHz | 3.2GHz | 16MB | 115W | $266 | |
| 6220 | 8/8 | 3.0GHz | 3.6GHz | 16MB | 115W | $523 | |
| 6234 | 12/12 | 2.4GHz | 3.1GHz | 16MB | 115W | $377 | |
| 6238 | 12/12 | 2.6GHz | 3.3GHz | 16MB | 115W | $455 | |
| 6262 HE | 16/16 | 1.6GHz | 2.9GHz | 16MB | 85W | $523 | |
| 6272 | 16/16 | 2.1GHz | 3.1GHz | 16MB | 115W | $523 | |
| 6274 | 16/16 | 2.2GHz | 3.2GHz | 16MB | 115W | $639 | |
| 6276 | 16/16 | 2.3GHz | 3.3GHz | 16MB | 115W | $788 | |
| 6282 SE | 16/16 | 2.6GHz | 3.5GHz | 16MB | 140W | $1,019 | |
We did an overview of Bulldozer lineup in our Details on AMD Bulldozer: Opterons to Feature Configurable TDP article. The basics are still the same. 4200 series is compatible with 4100 series' C32 socket; and 6200 series is compatible with 6100 series' G34 socket. That means existing motherboards are compatible with the new CPUs, although a BIOS update may be needed. The main difference between 4200 and 6200 series, on top of the core count, is the CPU configuration support: 4200 is limited to dual CPU configuration whereas 6200 series supports up to four CPUs in one system. 6200 also has a quad-channel memory controller, whereas 4200 is limited to two channels.
While Bulldozer was a letdown for desktops, it may be more attractive for servers. The biggest shortage of Bulldozer was its poor single-threaded performance, but server software is usually well threaded and can hence take advantage of all Bulldozer's cores.
Johan has received Opteron 6276 CPU and is already working on a review, so stay tuned!
Source: AMD
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JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
... is not in this first article. As always, it took some BIOS updating, some troubles because we updated the hypervisors and other software... I'll spare you, but Murphy's law hits us harder than ever. So we had to play somewhat safe, this review will focus on virtualization, rendering and some misc. benchmarks.We do have a FPGA benchmark that we fully understand now, and more HPC benchmarking is under review. Expect that later, but still this year. :-)
MossySF - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
I would like to see FOSS server benchmarks. Say Apache -> PHP/Perl/Java -> MemcacheD -> MySQL/PostgreSQL on Centos 6 using default distribution packages. Then virtualization under KVM. My own experience is much of the Intel advantage disappears when running FOSS but I only have my own machines to test against. There are many smaller companies that use FOSS aggressively because spending $100K on annual server licenses means the owner's salary is reduced by $100K.