Opteron "Sneak a Peek"
By: Tracy Cash
The wait is finally over. The Opteron is here. Since last year, many of
us have been in eager anticipation for the opportunity to get our hands
on this next generation processor from AMD. With details of the Opteron,
formerly code named Sledgehammer, being made known over the last several
months; the "expectation bar" has been raised high enough to
keep our eyes trained on this release date.
This next generation CPU brings several advances over the previous Athlon
Architecture from AMD. Gone is the Front Side Bus as you currently know
it. In comes the support of the x86-64 instruction set. Along with these
changes to the CPU core, we find an integrated DDR Memory Controller,
larger L2 cache, and HyperTransport Technology.
Several motherboard manufacturers have stepped up to introduce product
supporting the Opteron product line as well. Among these board makers
introducing products today is Tyan. Here is a shot of one of the Tyan
S2880 Opteron server motherboard.
Just to give a sample of what this new Opteron is capable of, we ran
the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark from SiSoft Sandra and compared a MP2200+
(1.8GHz) to a pair of Opteron 242 processors (1.6GHz). Take a look at
these results for a sampling of the power behind this new technology.
As you can see, there is a great deal of potential for the new Opteron
CPU. Just as it was with the previous Athlon CPU, the clock speed of the
chip is not to be the final factor is tallying the performance of this
new AMD CPU.
Stay tuned over the next few days as we here at AthlonXP.com plan to
bring you a complete review of the new Opteron processor. Along with the
processor, you will get to see the new chipsets debuting alongside the
Opteron as well as the hardware necessary to configure this latest offering
from AMD.
|
