2010.02.26 - cormageddon

after doing some reading/writing about more cores in CPUs (here come the cores, "free lunch is over") we finally get it in our stores! AMD has officially released Opteron 6000-series with from 8 to 12 cores.

since few days i'm doing a little computing for private purposes any my 4 cores on the server are not enough here. the task is very well scaling between cores (nearly no communication needed) and so increasing from 4 to 12 cores would make work almost 3 times faster. add gigabit ethernet, with channel bondling from 2 cards and we can easily compute on 2-3 such machines at home (36 cores at home would be quite impressive i must say!).

the problem is, as usually with new hardware – the price. it's not totally unaffordable, though 500Euro for the cheapest model (8-cores) up to 1100Euro for the most expensive (12-cores) is a lot, but comparing with the prices of some other solutions one might look for (i.e. Nvidia Tesla) it's really not that bad. probably in a short time intel will release similar CPUs as well and so hardware like this will become more common – so cheaper.

for now - let us wait and see! :)