first 12 core opterons surface

[deadrats]

there's not much to see, no benchmarks but evidently someone has gotten their hands on a 12 core K10 engineering sample:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=688110

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI1MjA3Mjc0NUpOaHJwZThYTTlfMV8yX2wuanBn

it would be nice if amd released a desktop version, i wouldn't mind if it was clocked at 800mhz, under very well threaded apps, like photo editing, video editing and encoding and even newer games this thing would kick ass.

[Soopafresh]

I'll bet Notepad pops right on open on that machine.

[rallynavvie]

it would be nice if amd released a desktop version, i wouldn't mind if it was clocked at 800mhz, under very well threaded apps, like photo editing, video editing and encoding and even newer games this thing would kick ass.

Like most of the server platforms there will probably be single-socket solutions for this chip. There were plenty of single-socket Opteron boards which ran a lot better than the FX-series Athlons, people were just afraid of the Opteron badge and the strange stats on workstation boards. It's going to cost more, but then that's what it takes to get the absolute most out of a machine.

I think the multi-core thing is getting out of control though. We're even getting to the point where the diminishing returns are being seen on 8+ core systems. Most of the benchmarks I've seen don't show the 5500-series Xeons getting twice the performance with two sockets running, at least not with consumer applications. These multi-core systems do handle VMs really well, provided you feed them enough memory.