AMD claims that server customers want more cores. John Fruehe, director of product marketing for server/workstation products at AMD said that the latest twelve-core microprocessors for servers are more popular than eight-core Opteron chips among server customers.

The fact proves that customers prefer to have larger amount of cores amid lower amount of servers since this generally provides higher performance per watt ratio.

Speaking to Xbit labs Fruehe said that looking through sales data for the first half of 2010, 12-core processors clearly outsold their 8-core counterparts. “I was expecting that there would be a slight bias towards the 12-core, but I figured there were plenty of applications where the extra clock speed of an 8-core might be popular. I was wrong, customers are voting with their budgets, and cores matter," Fruehe said.

Most punters want to run a virtualization machine per core, so with twelve-core processors, their consolidation can get very dense. But with with 24 cores in a 2P server, there are plenty of resources to allow all of the VMs to have plenty of access to compute power whenever they need it.

Next year AMD is releasing 16 core Bulldozer-based products.