Based on the Piledriver architecture, Abu Dhabi Opterons will come in a variety of flavours ranging from quad-core to 16-core parts.
According to Xbitlabs, the chips will have relatively low clock speeds, which should translate into good performance-per-watt figures. Due to performance limitations inherent to Piledriver cores, which did not prove much faster than Bulldozer, AMD seems to be shifting focus away from the desktop market to servers, where it hopes to make good on Piledriver’s superior efficiency.
However, if Piledriver fails to live up to expectations, AMD will have to wait for next generation Steamroller cores if it hopes to close the gap with current generation Intel server parts. This would mean that AMD would lag behind Intel by as much as two years in terms of performance, claims Xbit.
More here.