AMD had their 2012 Financial Analyst Day today, which is basically a dog and pony show for stock analysts.

Previously, AMD had talked about introducing a new G2012 platform in 2012/2013, which would use 10 and 20-core processors called Sepang and Terramar. Those plans have been cancelled, and what we will get instead is a drop-in G34 socket replacement for existing Opteron 6200 CPUs, which will be “Abu Dhabi” and “Seoul” , using the upcoming Piledriver core.

If you take the current Opteron 6200 lineup, upgrade the CPU cores to Piledriver ,  you get “Abu Dhabi” and “Seoul”. The sockets will remain the same, as do the core counts, but performance should go up. Since they will use the same sockets as Interlagos and Valencia, they won’t require a server refresh from the system vendors.

AMD hasn’t released any more detail as to what Piledriver will have other than to say that it’s a higher IPC version of Bulldozer. The next core designs after that are called “Steamroller” and “Excavator”. You have to love AMD’s code-names, which show a perhaps unwarranted optimism about their destiny in the marketplace. As I have said before, I am actually rooting for AMD to do better to try to keep Intel honest.

Filed under: Computer Hardware, Processors, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012 Tagged: AMD, AMD Opteron 6200 Series