PCWorld : Advanced Micro Devices has place the brakes on adding more cores to the server chips, stopping at 16, the organization said Thursday after a financial analyst day.

AMD’s new server chips code-named Abu Dhabi and going to be out in 2013 will have 16 cores, a similar number as the existing Opteron 6200 chips code-named Interlagos that shipped this past year. Servers are now being redesigned to fit specialty workloads and adding more cores to the Abu Dhabi chip wasn’t the way to boost performance, said Lisa Su, senior vp and general manager of worldwide Sections at AMD, throughout a speech.

“At no more the morning, that wasn’t the correct answer for the customers,” Su said.

Abu Dhabi is directed at two- and four-socket servers and will be with different new processor architecture code-named Piledriver. The chip will probably be socket-compatible and become a straight plug-in alternative to Opteron 6200 chips, that are based on the Bulldozer core. Abu Dhabi will deliver more performance but drink the same power because the Opteron 6200.

There are additional solutions to boost server performance, including using graphics processors, Su said. Graphics processors are used in most of the world’s fastest supercomputers to handle demanding scientific and math applications.

“This is the place it’s really down to system-level optimization,” Su said.

The organization can also be available to employing “lots of little cores” to satisfy specific workloads, Su said. AMD is researching featuring its low-power netbook processors to satisfy light Web serving and cloud workloads, plus some servers already employ a huge selection of low-power Intel Atom netbook chips to process fast-moving Web transactions.

Chip makers in the past have reduced core counts as some applications are not designed to destroy up tasks over multiple cores. Oracle this year halved the amount of cores in the Sparc T4 processor so that they can improve single-thread performance, which is key when running large databases and back-end applications.

Intel continues to be increasing the amount of cores on its chips in a slower pace than AMD. Intel uses 10 cores on its fastest Xeon server chips.

AMD is not going to add cores to its other server chips either. The business the coming year will even release new server chips code-named Seoul and Delhi with up to eight cores for various server segments.

AMD also shared additional specifics of chips for PCs and tablets due in 2010. The Hondo tablet chip, that may draft to 4.5 watts of power, will be in Windows 8 tablets later this season, the organization said. Chips code-named Trinity will demonstrate up in thin-and-light laptops priced between US$600 and $800 by midyear. The laptops will deliver around 12 hours of life cycle of battery and have been pitched as being a cheaper alternative to Intel’s ultrabooks.

Also due this year are chips code-named Brazos 2.0, the followup to existing C-Series and E-Series chips found in low-power laptops today. Laptops with Brazos 2.0 chips will deliver roughly the identical level of life of the battery, but have better graphics and application performance.

AMD also ripped up its old map and introduced a tablet and laptop processor lineup for next year. A whole new chip for performance PCs code-named Kaveri is based about the new Steamroller core. Chips code-named Temash for tablets and Kabini for low-power laptops will improve performance while driving down power consumption.

AMD also outlined a new chip design plan called HSA (heterogeneous systems architecture) in which the company will gradually blur the lines between the CPU and GPU and implement third-party intellectual property in the chip. The chip code-named Kabini will include some portions of HSA, as outlined by AMD’s product road map.

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