AMD CELEBRATED its Opteron chip's sixth birthday in a fitting way by accelerating the six-core Istanbul release to June, and by announcing the 12-core total of two Istanbul dies in one Magny-Cours package to come out half a year later. At the same time, Intel's single die eight-core, 16-thread Beckton Nehalem EX should be out a little before Magny-Cours, followed by native 32nm six-core Westmere DP chips early next year. How well will they stand up against each other? Well, core for core and clock for clock, Istanbul will still be behind Nehalem in most cases, whether you look at CPU, cache or memory bound benchmarks. Nehalem only seems to be beaten clock for clock by the older Penryn in some tight loops and cryptography jobs, for now.