There's no big hoopla from Sun about it, the company has simply announced that Solaris, Java and Sun ONE work very nicely on the Opteron, thank you very much. But it doesn't take much reading between the lines to get the real gist of the story.

AMD expects databases to be the primary application for Opteron at first. IBM already issued a beta of DB2 for the Opteron earlier this year, and Microsoft is expected to release a version of SQL Server for the chip in the near future. Oracle, however, has thus far said nothing of its plans regarding Opteron.

AMD's answer to hyperthreading technology is called HyperTransport�AMD's implementation of an open specification governed by the HyperTransport Consortium. Instead of jumping on the bus battle with Intel, AMD claims HyperTransport obviates the front-side bus and gets rid of latencies in SMP systems. AMD is basically telling Intel that it's not getting into the bus race because buses are a poor form of transportation in the age of flight. Result: AMD succeeds.

What is interesting about this statement is on how many levels it is wrong. One thing, LDT or Lightning Data Transport, now called HyperTransport was introduced back in January of 2001. Yeah buddy, HyperTransport is pre HyperThreading, and it has a consortium. Not to mention that it is a high speed interconnect bus technology, and not anything you will find crunching data inside a CPU.

The second task was that AMD had to persuade operating system vendors to produce Opteron-optimized versions. It's obvious that a processor without an operating system is less useful than a doorstop. That's about where the Opteron was just over a year ago, when AMD had no operating system vendor backing it up.

Ok, so in March of 2002, over a year ago, Suse was Hammer. Oh, the fun continues.

It wasn't until Comdex Fall 2002, however, that AMD showed a prototype of 64-bit Windows running on Opteron. And even with this, it still wasn't clear until recently that Microsoft was committed to Opteron. Microsoft is on board, although it looks now like it's a reaction to the Linux distributors' 64-bit Opteron-optimized distributions. Result: AMD barely makes it.

Result, here we show 64 bit Windows on Hammer at E3 2002. That's a few months ahead of Comdex 2002 just so you know John. And here's a tip. Perhaps you should do some research before you publish so many incorrect things. I don't even have time to go over all of them since we are knee deep in testing. Anyway I suggest some Google HyperResearch for the next Hammer story. Well guys keep on hitting AMDZone.com for accurate and complete news on Hammer like we have been doing for over four years now.

Smaller manufacturers like RackSaver will release Opteron servers this week, and analysts believe that big companies like IBM could follow suit. If that happens, AMD will be able to compete against Intel in everything--not just the consumer and small-business segment, which accounts for only around 30 percent of the total market. Microsoft, IBM and Linux companies currently are writing software for the chip.

SuSE has been more aggressive than Red Hat in embracing computers beyond Linux's stronghold on Intel Pentium and Xeon processors. Its SLES software now runs on computers with those processors, on computers with Opteron chips, on computers with Intel's 64-bit Itanium competitor and on IBM's four different server lines.

"We have built a family of products out of one single source-code base," said Markus Rex, head of development for SuSE. That unification makes it easier for software companies to make their products available for multiple computer lines.

The Opteron is a device that consists of several main components: a 64-bit core, 64-KB of Level 1 instruction cache, 64-KB of Level 1 data cache, 1-MB of Level 2 cache, a double-data-rate (DDR) memory controller, and a HyperTransport unit.

The Level 1 cache is a two-way, set-associative unit, while the Level 2 cache boasts a 16-way architecture. The memory controller supports DDR-133, DDR-200, and DDR-266 SDRAMs. And the HyperTransport unit supports up to three links or paths to the I/O, for an aggregate bandwidth of 19.2-gigabits-per-second.

Ok, I don't know what DDR133 is. I think we have some mistakes here.

ne early buyer for the Opteron is Texas A&M; University, which will put together a Linux-based computer cluster with 256 processors that will be used by researchers in several departments.

"This was the first foray into 64-bit technology at a price that is approachable by ordinary consumers, including universities," said Steven Johnson, a systems analyst for the A&M; mathematics department. "We wanted to get the most bang for the buck for the university."

Ok, so the Statesman says 256 CPUs for the cluster, and A&M; is just a couple of hour drive from here so I'm going with their number.

AMD is aiming Opteron at the market sweet spot of two- and four-way servers, giving IT managers a platform to link 32-bit X86 applications with the growing suite of 64-bit enterprise software. Opteron, with its Hammer CPU core, "drives a wedge between Intel's Itanium and Xeon" processors, said Kevin Krewell, an analyst at Instat/MDR (San Jose, Calif.). "That gives AMD a shot, because Intel has left too wide a gap between the high end of the Xeon line and the low end of Itanium."

FOR AMD, it's the bottom of the 9th inning (End of the game of baseball for non-Yanks), the bases are loaded, and there's a batter going up to the plate. His name is Opteron, and he needs to score. He's got a lot of people cheering for him in the press and a select group of elite fans that need his 64-bit power. Will he have the power to score big? Not just a couple of runs, but hitting a home run and bringing everyone in.

The newspaper said the science department at the university needs additional memory addressability and that's what the university wants.

Smaller manufacturers like RackSaver will release Opteron servers this week, and analysts believe that big companies like IBM could follow suit. If that happens, AMD will be able to compete against Intel in everything--not just the consumer and small-business segment, which accounts for only around 30 percent of the total market. Microsoft, IBM and Linux companies currently are writing software for the chip.

But though AMD has the link on its home page, this is really an Avnet page, demonstrating that when it comes to baskets, Chimpzilla certainly shows how to put all of its eggs in them.

Probably, if you're a techie reader of this website, you may not know or care about this kind of move. But in the world of money and marketing, what it means is that Avnet appears to have an exclusive on online processor in a box sales.

Pre-Production Hardware: Listing their VIA K8T400M motherboard as a "good one" (whether it is or isn't) is hardly a decision that inspires confidence in the performance of a platform. Anyone whose reviewed motherboards (and XBit certainly has) knows that pre-production silicon can have a significant impact on performance.

WITH OPTERON now officially set to debut at 1.6 and 1.8 GHz clockspeeds (and no 2 GHz model as initially hoped) discussions have resurfaced as to how well AMD is able to scale the Hammer architecture. 1.8 GHz, after all, is nothing new for the AthlonXP�AMD reached this speed nine months ago with the nuclear-furnace original-model 2200+ and shot nimbly past that speed once AMD revised their .13 micron process and cut their heat dissipation.

AMD - Athlon XP 2500 (1.86GHz, 512KB, 333MHz, Socket A) - 688940


AMD - Athlon XP 3000+ (2.16GHz, 512KB, 333MHz, Socket A) - 688942


AMD - OPTERON DP Server Model 240 - 773721


AMD - AMD ATHLON XP 3200+ - 783372


AMD - Athlon XP 2800+ (2.08GHz, 512KB, 333MHz, Socket A) - 688941


Asus - A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 AMD Athlon XP/Duron, Socket A, ATX, 3GB DDR-SDRAM,
333MHz FSB - 659525


Shuttle - SN41G2 Small Form Factor Barebones - 678701


AMD - OPTERON DP Server Model 242 - 773724


AMD - Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz, 256KB, 266MHz, Socket A) OEM - 653341


AMD - OPTERON DP Server Model 240 (PIB) - 773723

On April 22, AMD will announce three processors, each using the Opteron-specific version of its "model number": the 1.4-GHz model 240, the 1.6-GHz model 242, and the 1.8-GHz model 244 chip, according to John Crank, AMD's brand manager for the Opteron. A 2.0-GHz model 246 is due later in the year.

Eight-way 800-series Opterons are due late in the second quarter, about the time that 100-class uniprocessor Opterons will be available, Crank said. All Opterons designed for the server market contain 1 Mbyte of level-2 cache.

The first digit in the model number designates the number of Opterons in the system; the next two connote performance. "Performance" derives from a variety of factors, including clock speed, cache size, the speed and bit width of the HyperTransport bus link connecting it to other processors, the size of the cache, and the speed of the integrated memory controller.


"If you were to take a hypothetical model 260 and 256 chip, you could conceivably have a higher-performance chip that runs at a lower clock speed," Crank said.

They have the luxury of not only testing it, but also publishing NDA material on it. That must be nice.

e Opteron is being rated at a thermal design power, or thermal tolerance, of 80 watts, according to sources. But OEMs familiar with the design say AMD is being generous and allowing quite a bit of future thermal headroom for faster Opterons.

"That's the spec," said Phil Hester, chief executive of Newisys, a Texas server startup wholly focused on the Opteron, and in which AMD owns a minority stake. "But the actual is more like 40 watts." Part of the Newisys sales pitch is to allow customers to touch the working Opteron chip package, which is "slightly warm to the touch," Hester said.