Nearly 10 years ago, AMD attempted to break Intel's stranglehold on the server market with the Opteron 6272, a 16-core processor with 16 threads. Its price at launch was $523, but you can now get hold of one for £31.99 (around $40/AU$60) on eBay - and yes, you can fit up to four of them in a server (opens in new tab) or workstation (opens in new tab).
(opens in new tab)The vendor is based in the UK, but will ship to many countries worldwide for an additional fee. Should remaining stocks run dry, there are still a fair few 6272s available from other sellers.
Based on the Bulldozer architecture, the Opteron 6272 was produced using a 32nm manufacturing process, has a TDP of 115W and 32MB cache with a base frequency of 2.1GHz.
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Unsurprisingly, these parts have been pulled from a working environment. Opteron processors are server CPUs, used primarily in data centres that support service providers (i.e. web hosting (opens in new tab) , cloud storage (opens in new tab) and SaaS companies).
Fast forward to 2020 and AMD has its best chance in a decade to make a splash, with the new EPYC (opens in new tab) range that has up to 64 cores per CPU and is built using 7nm process.
Have you managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications, in stock and brand new? Let us know and we'll tip our hat to you.
Compared to its predecessor, AMD's new server processor enjoys a much higher IPC (instruction per clock), larger cache, multithreading and the ability to ramp up the core count with ease.
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