The company's upcoming 12-core server chips, code-named Magny-Cours, put two six-core chips in one package. The same silicon is used in its six-core chips, code-named Istanbul, which are part of the Opteron line of server processors.

However at the Hot Chips conference at Standford University they have been showing off some real candy, pop four of these processors on a 4 socket motheboard slash server, and then demonstrate 48 physcial CPU cores.

The socket itself gets a revamp from the existing 1,207-pin Socket-F, to the 1,974-pin Socket G34. The high pin-count ensures connections to HyperTransport links, four DDR3 memory connections, and other low-level IO.

Tsssk, such show-offs, look at that.