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.

The line-up will include three models: Xeon X7460 with 2.67GHz clock frequency and 130W TDP, Xeon E7450 with 2.4GHz frequency and 90W TDP and low-voltage Xeon L7455 with 65W TDP and 2.13GHz clock speed. All processors will be built with Intel‘s new 45-nanometer Penryn technology and will support 1066MHz bus speed. Xeon X7460 will be equipped with 16MB L3 cache while Xeon L7455 and Xeon E7450 will have a 12MB L3 cache onboard.

“The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance,” Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corp.’s digital enterprise group said previously. “We’re quite excited about it.” The new Intel Xeon processor X7460 with 6 cores and 16MB L3 cache for expandable servers launching in September has already broken multiple performance world records. An 8-socket IBM System x3950 M2 server became the first platform to break the 1 million tpmC barrier on the TPC-C benchmark. New 4-Socket performance records include TPC-C on HP Proliant DL580 G5, TPC-E on Dell PowerEdge R900, SPECjbb2005 on Sun Fire X4450 and SPECint_rate2006 on Fujitsu-Siemens PRIMERGY RX600 S4.