AMD isn’t relying on sheer number of cores, as they’re adding power management technologies and certain improvements to increase performance. Unlike the announced Shanghais, where the company hopes for similar performance at lower consumption, the aim with Istanbul CPUs is to increase performance at same consumption.

AMD’s product marketing director in server and workstation division, Margaret Lewis said that the Istanbul chips are based on Shangai cores, together with the same energy efficient parts and additional cache, and that the improvements AMD’s got in store should help the chip in handling heavier processing loads.

AMD’s Istanbul server processors are scheduled for 2H 2009, and big names such as Dell and HP are already on the list of customers.