Not so fast, I remember AMD officials saying phenom was 40% faster than Athlon X2 per core, look how that turned out.

I still hope it's true though :)

Well it was about that fast. Just it launched at 2.3GHz when Athlon 64 X2 was at 3.0GHz, and when Intel's stuff was 50% faster than the Athlon 64 X2 per clock per core. Unfortunate timing on AMD's part really - how could they know Intel would come out with something twice as fast as their previous generation with lower power and smaller die size, practically overnight?

These are server processors, it's very easy to make server applications run on 16 cores (or N cores).

Got 16,000 visiting VGChartz at the same time? No problem, each core will deal with 1,000 since they're almost independent workloads.

The practical application is HUGE for server virtualization.

Right now, the company I work for is using a system I designed & configured in which we have six servers that would traditionally each be installed on their own physical piece of hardware, that are instead virtualized on one badass hardware server. This server is running dual, quad core CPUs (for a total of 8 cores) and 3 RAID1 arrays using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. We are able to run all six servers with a total of 12 virtual processors on a single hardware server that only has 8 physical processor cores without any slowdown, this is because VMWare uses something called Virtual Symetric Multiprocessing to schedule out clock requests across all CPU cores.

With a total of 24 processor cores (12 per physical processor) and a ton of memory, you could theoretically run as many as 12-16 (or more) virtual servers on one physical machine, each with two virtual processors, without any siginificant slowdown (assuming your storage device can keep up with this). The cost savings are tremendous for enterprise server virtualization, but have few benefits outside of this application vs a standard quad core processor configuration. Desktop applications wouldn't see a huge boost because they will most likely not be programmed with 24-32 CPU cores in mind.

Now just imagine a quad processor server, with each processor having 16 cores. That's 64 processor cores on one piece of hardware, holy crap! Add in 128GB of RAM and just imagine how much you could do with that.

EDIT: The power savings are also incredible, if you can virtualize 12 or more traditional hardware servers onto a single server, the financial savings as well as the reduced impact on the environment are great.

i disagree... merom was exactly what everyone was waiting for and AMD sat on the success of the X2's hoping they wont have to play catch up. If AMD had worked harder n faster on the phenom things might be a lil different today. Anyhow this new 16 core thing looks promsing, what news on the fusion?

Friended for name/avatar combo, but also because this explanation doesn't make me feel like a caveman.

Most technology explanations do, you see.

Haha! Very true, very true. I try to make any tech explanation as simple as possible. One of my jobs is to provide end user helpdesk support to about 300 small business users. I've learned that I can't use my mumbo jumbo talk and get anything done over the phone or in email. Most tech guys are too impatient to try and think outside their own head so that the end user can actually understand them.

Example: normal 'tech' guy: "Ok, go into your network settings and check the IP"

Me: "Ok, now click Start... it's at the bottom of your screen, now click Control Panel, now if there's an option that says switch to classic view, click on that. Do you see the icon called 'Network Connections'? Ok, it should be about halfway down, it looks like a globe with something plugged into it, yeah, that's it! Click on that, now double click on your Local Area Network, click the Support tab and tell me what it says."

It takes longer to say but it actually allows me to communicate with non-techy people, a bridge that some simply cannot cross .

2011 with Bulldozer; and only on the lower half of the market where it makes financial sense. Intel's version is 2010 but they're using their current integrated graphics as the graphics so it will still suck. AMD will of course use some Radeon-based solution.

i have a quad core