AMD's latest financial reports and in and the company is looking for a way to turn things around as they reported a net loss of $416 million. In an effort to turn things around and increase profitibality, AMD said that it will start shipping its six-core Opterons, codenamed Istanbul, in May this year.

Istanbul will feature 6MB of L3 cache and an integrated dual-channel DDR2 memory controller. Perhaps the most talked about addition to the AMD's Opterons is the new HyperTransport Assist feature that should reduce the traffic on socket-to-socet HyperTransport links.

Another perk for Istanbul is that it is a drop in replacement for existing Opteron based systems. Since the chip utilizes Socket F, the only other items Istanbul will requre to be an upgrade is that the system supports split power planes and a BIOS update.

AMD originally planned to launch Istanbul in the second half of the year. Either things are much worse than AMD is letting on or they have made serious headway with the development of Istanbul.

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday said that in a bid to boost sales of its lucrative microprocessors for servers it would start to ship its six-core AMD Opteron central processing units code-named already in May, 2009. The company needs the new chips as although it managed to improve sales of its microprocessors in Q1 2009, the company is still deeply unprofitable.

"I am pleased to announce that because of our strong engineering execution, we are pulling in revenue shipments of Istanbul into May, for system availability in June," said Dirk Meyer, president and chief executive officer of AMD, during conference call with financial analysts.