Meet AMD's New History-Making, 16-Core Beast

Your quad-core computer doesn't seem so great anymore now, does it, champ? AMD's Opteron 6200 boasts 16 cores running at up to 2.6 GHz each. That is a lot of number crunching—and the first x86 with 16 cores.

Sadly, the monster isn't really made for you. AMD's going after server farms with the 16-headed Opteron—places where all of those cores can actually be taken advantage of, as opposed to a game of WoW. But in case you really, really want all those cores—and money isn't a problem—the upper deck model can be snapped up for a cool $1,020. That's only like $64 a core! And since the 6200 uses AMD's power-saving Bulldozer architecture, you might even end up saving money, in some extremely complex rationalization you might want to employ. Tenuous, fine. So how about this? The 6200 can overclock its cores on the fly by up to an extra 1 GHz, and supports up to 384 GB of RAM. I can't wait to see how Skype runs on this thing. [AMD via PC World]