AMD scored a key victory in processors today by launching the Opteron 6000 series. The members of the Magny-Cours family are the first using the x86 architecture to ship with either eight or 12 cores and can handle many more tasks at once than previous processors. A 12-core example can be twice as fast as the previous six-core Opteron and fend off Intel's six-core Xeon 5600.
