AMD Opteron 6300 - Up to 16 cores of Piledriver

Around this time last year, AMD released its Bulldozer architecture into the server market in the form of the 6200 and 4200 series, where it claimed superior efficiency and costing against Intel's comparative Xeon cores. Though benchmarks of Bulldozer failed to impress in the consumer market, the chip performs quite well when it comes to heavy multitasking workloads and has been AMD's pride and joy in the server segment.

It goes without saying then, that the firm would want to introduce its enhanced-Bulldozer AKA Piledriver architecture as-soon-as possible, as the new design builds upon the capabilities of Bulldozer, whilst offering superior power efficiency and performance.

AMD has begun by releasing the Piledriver-based 6300 series, a slot-in replacement for the 6200 series.

Last generation, AMD's frontrunner at launch was the Opteron 6282 SE, also with 16 cores and with a TDP of 140W, however clock speeds were at 2.6GHz with a maximum turbo of 3.3GHz. Since then, the 6284 SE has hit the market, offering 2.7GHz within the same TDP and so, frequency-wise, the 6300-series is a marginal step forwards, though the Piledriver architecture also delivers more per Hertz performance.

This time around AMD is claiming a performance boost of up to 24 per cent over the previous generation, with an overall efficiency improvement of 40 per cent when benchmarked alongside Bulldozer. Whilst Intel has heated-up competition in the high-end server market, AMD remains cost competitive, however, will it be enough to maintain or perhaps even grow its market share?