AMD launches Magny-Cours competition
AMD's latest wheeze sees it crowsourcing ideas for using 48 cores in a server - and the winner gets a quartet of Magny-Cours chips.
As announced on the AMD at Work blog by director of server and workstation product marketing John Fruehe - via ARN - the competition asks users to write an essay or blog post - or for the more theatrically-minded, create a video - which describes in no more than five hundred words just what could be achieved with a server running four 12-core Magny-Cours processors.
The prizes on offer for doing AMD's marketing are pretty sweet: the lucky winner will receive a quartet of 12-core 2.2GHz Magny-Cour processors - to be called the Opteron 6174 once it has officially launched - along with a copy of Windows Server 2008. In order to build a system using the prizes, the winner will also receive a Tyan S8812 quad-socket motherboard - although the DDR3 RAM will have to be purchased separately, and with the board supporting up to eight DIMMs per socket it could prove an expensive prize once all is said and done.
Sadly, the competition is only open to residents of the US and Canada aged 18 and above, but for those geographically and chronologically eligible AMD is offering the chance to be "one of the first to have such a historic product" as the "first [...] 12-core x86 processors in the market."
If you're interested in entering, simply create your 500 word essay or blog post, or 3 minute video - preferably demonstrating how 48-core servers could "help society [and] help others" - and send it to AMD's marketing department via the entry form by the 24th of March and cross your fingers.
With AMD's latest server range offering impressive performance to go with the massive number of cores per chip - with Fruehe pointing out that the Opteron 6100 series will offer 33 percent more memory channels "than expected competing Intel products" while offering "more than double the memory throughput of our existing products" - the winner could end up with one of the fastest rigs around.
Any American readers tempted to try their hand at selling AMD products in order to get a forty-eight core rig, or are you struggling to think of a reason for that many cores good enough for AMD to use in its marketing? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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According to the link on AMD blog competing Intel product is Westmere-EP(tri-channel DDR3 memory controller). Let's wish AMD some luck for a change...
If one frame is fully rendered by one core you MIGHT MIGHT get like 12fps
If i was going to enter id say 48 CPU's is better left for like government/military applications. Not like terminators but lets use the scenario where the police are looking for a murderer or something. Assuming there were camera's (or high res satellite images) a processor like this and enough RAM the computer could use the satellite's to take pictures of people who look like the suspect and cross reference that with where the crime happened and when and give the police a "its most likely one of these people" list.
Or the FBI could just watch you bathe for kicks.
http://www.top500.org/
Welcome to Earth....
Like 48 isn't it? Thats likely to be playable.
I wonder if these chips are overclockable? Probably not but hey, we can hope. Cooling for these chips must also be quite large.
The best use of 48 cores is having them because we can
A great way to make use of that is by making real-life simulations in engineer, better, faster and more accurate simulations and medicine. It can also be used to guess the loto and euromillions numbers which could be a cheap investment xD
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=184316
But ya my title could have been better. Hindsight, great eh. :)
It is 64-bit, the article just mentioned x86 to refer to the class of processor (in comparison to ARM-type architectures). It would be extremely silly for a quad opteron system with 32 memory slots and 48 cores to have no more than 4gb of memory address space :P