AMD ships '16-core' Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200

We seem to have mislaid our definition of fashionably late -- a fortnight after the promised "October" launch, systems packing AMD's Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200 (formerly Interlagos) will commence shipping to enterprise customers. If you haven't been paying too much attention, you might just believe the claim about it having 16 cores -- Bulldozer's architecture has eight two-core modules rather than 16 independent ones. Despite the short delay and the conspicuous claims, the company reckons it's 84 percent faster, 73 percent more efficient and uses half the power of the equivalent Intel Xeon. At the same time, Sunnyvale firmed up news on the Valencia (Opteron 4200) and announced 2012's Opteron 3000 platform with the new Zurich chip -- designed to run on low-power web hosts. Enterprise customers can read the PR we've got after the break and then begin placing orders; the rest of us will have to keep waiting to see if Andre Yang can push his FX all the way to 9GHz.