This one may be a bit too subtle for most, but bear with me here.  AMD's latest Opteron has a lot of cores, 12 per chip to be exact.  It's got so many cores that AMD's codename for the chip is Magny-Cours.  Did I mention that AMD likes naming things after Formula 1 courses?  Gotta get the most out of that Ferrari sponsorship.

The target?  Intel's new 32nm 6-core Xeon processors, introduced just two weeks ago. AMD is roughly a year away from shipping 32nm CPUs in volume, and the same distance away from its brand new Bulldozer architecture, so AMD had to do something more drastic to compete.

AMD sent us a test platform with a pair of 12-core Opteron 6174s.  We're talking about a 692mm² die, 19.6MB of cache and 12 Opteron cores on a single package.  And we've got two of them.  Is that enough to beat Intel's 6-core Xeons?  Let's find out.