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Opteron S939 to be replaced with AM2

Quoting from The Inquirer

ALONGSIDE SOCKET 1207 or Socket F, however you prefer - AMD will roll out Opterons for the Socket AM2 as well.

The Socket AM2 line-up will consist of 1200 series of processors, but the 2200 series will be added to the AM2 mix.

Until now, you could buy a workstation Opteron for single socket only, but with the imminent arrival of the Socket 4x4 platform, the company will allow manufacturers to have two Socket AM2 processors on a single motherboard.

Opterons for Socket AM2 will support the DDR2-800 memory clock, while the Socket F babies will remain stuck in the world of DDR2-667. FB-DIMM support isn't expected before the first DDR-III modules appear in that format. And thermals get better, of course - in the current configuration, FB-DIMM modules eat power in the same manner as the SouthBridge or NorthBridge chip does - and is a bit of a challenge to cool.

Expect a full line-up to appear. Opterons for Socket AM2 will be slightly cheaper than the Athlon 64 X2s, and this could mean a field day for the grey market.

As many enthusiasts will recall, the pricing of Opteron 145 and 165 was so good, that the corresponding Athlon 64-branded part was around 10-20 per cent more expensive. If you add in the fact that every Opty had a 1MB of L2 cache per core, and that X2 3800+ and 4200+ come with a 512KB, you didn't have to be a maths expert to figure what should you buy.

The new batch of Opterons will support the Reverse HyperThreading technology as well, so it'll be interesting to see how the Opteron target audience will react. Remember, the field of workstations and servers is a multi-threaded field, where every core counts and software vendors don't produce Latin-soap opera dramas when it comes to switching from single to a multicore world. CryTek gang excluded, of course.

On another note, it seems that Pacifica virtualization tech has finally gotten branded. AMD Virtualization or AMD-V has been imprinted on its side with a hot poker. We guess security features will be probably dubbed as AMD Security or AMD-S.

We will enter the new four-number Opteron world on July the 17th, while availability is set on "immediate" for preffered partners. Mass availability will have to wait a bit.

Read and respond to the original article, here.

Published Friday, June 23, 2006 6:46 AM by David Marshall
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