AMD has just announced that its Bulldozer-based server-oriented Interlagos CPU has now begun shipping to OEMs and retailers, with availability pegged for the fourth quarter — October, hopefully. Interlagos, or the Opteron 6200 as it is now officially known, is the world’s first 16-core x86 processor, and is pin-compatible with Socket G34 (Magny-Cours/Opteron 6100) motherboards.

Or, rather, it’s the world’s first 16-core processor according to the AMD press release: in actual fact, the Opteron 6200 has eight Bulldozer modules, and each module contains two independent integer processors, but only a single FPU and shared fetch/decode/execute units; in other words, it has more than one core, but not quite two. In the long run, Bulldozer should scale more efficiently than conventional lots-of-independent-core architectures, but in the short — at least according to early benchmarks — term there are likely to be bottlenecks and unpredictable performance hits until the new architecture is fully understood.

According to the press release, large quantities of Opteron 6200 chips have been earmarked for supercomputer applications that are currently being built, such as installations that use the new 35-petaflop Cray XK6, and until Intel’s Knights Ferry arrives in 2012 the cheaper-than-Xeon chip should enjoy complete domination of the HPC market.

As for the 8-core Bulldozer-based desktop-oriented Zambezi CPU, AMD has been worrisomely quiet. There have been reports that AMD is struggling to clock Bulldozer cores to speeds that would be competitive with Intel’s Core i7 chips, which would jive with the preemptive release of the slower, more-stately Interlagos chip. AMD needs to get a move on, though: Zambezi is the chip that’s meant to usher in a new age of AMD competitiveness with the market-dominating Core i processors — it will even bear the standard of the returning, much-loved FX brand! — but if AMD doesn’t pull its finger out, Intel’s next generation of Sandy Bridge-E processors will arrive before Zambezi can even hit the shelves.