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AMD Pushes Six-core Chips as Upgrade to Shanghai - PC World.

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced six-core Opteron chips, which make them the fastest server chips the company has released to date.

Until now, AMD offered only quad-core server processors, with the fastest being Opteron chips code-named Shanghai. The six-core chips, code-named Istanbul, will offer 30 percent faster performance while drawing the same amount of power as Shanghai chips, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for AMD's server workstation group. ...

Dell benchmarked the six-core chip and said it provides better application performance -- up to 61 percent in some cases -- compared to quad-core Shanghai chips. "Customers can get improved performance in I/O intensive applications like databases and technical computing without taking up more floor space or power consumption," said Sally Stevens, vice president of platform marketing at Dell.

If you want to dig a little deeper into features, like HT Assist, check out articles from The Register,  AnandTech, and The Tech Report. The nice thing from a buyer's perspective, aside from being a great platform for high-end workloads, is that it's a drop-in replacement for the previous Shanghai parts -- same footprint and socket interface -- so that VMware has already qualified it and OEMs should be experiencing a quick path to certifying their new server models with vSphere.

And, of course, using VMware Enhanced VMotion Compatibility, you can migrate your virtual machines from older AMD boxes to your new servers seamlessly. [via VMblog.com]