AMD has officially introduced the Opteron 6000 series, based on the 12-core Magny Cours architecture.

The chips pack 12 cores and 12MB of L3 cache and DDR3 support. We already mentioned several Opteron 6000 parts, but it's still worth noting the slowest version will run at 1.7GHz with and that it will draw just 65W of power. AMD will offer several processors in the 1.7GHz to 2.3GHz clock range, but even the fastest one will consume just 105W.

AMD claims that the 2.2GHz Opteron 6174 will outpace Intel's 3.3GHz six-core Xeon 5680 without breaking a sweat. However, Intel is expected to release Nehalem EX chips in a matter of days, so AMD's lead could be short lived. However, AMD could still do well, as its CPUs are expected to be somewhat cheaper than Intel's.