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AMD Opteron Due In April

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the grain-of-salt-please dept.

updog writes "Here's an article from Infoworld claiming that the new 64-bit AMD Opteron is ready to launch on April 22. Some of the notable features of the new chip are an address space capable of addressing up to 1 Terabyte of memory, the ability to link up to 8 processors without any external chips, and backwards compatibility with existing 32-bit applications ..." PapaFSmurf, meanwhile, links to a disclaimer-heavy article posted at amdboard.com which says that 64-bit Athlons may arrive in June rather than September as previously expected.

5 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprising by rabtech · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Barton isn't enough to keep AMD going against Intel until Sept. Simply not gonna happen, and I think they have seen that coming and are trying to head it off by launching the Athlon64 closer to its originally planned release.

    Once the Athlon64 is available and people are building systems using it, AMD just stole back the "King of PC processors" title and in a BIG way.

    --
    Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
  2. This is huge by Toasty16 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Affordable x86 64-bit servers for the masses, this is going to revitalize AMD and really put it on the map as a serious challenger to Intel. I hope Chipzilla wakes up and sees that its incredibly expensive and backwards-incompatible Itanic 2 chips are the result of engineers developing for themselves instead of developing for the needs of their customers. Finally, AMD will be able to court the high profit business market, though I fear that they might alienate their hardcore enthusiast consumers in the process...

  3. Only 1 TB? by MagPulse · · Score: 4, Interesting
    64 bits should give you 18 exabytes right? What's the limiting factor?
    2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
    ^EB ^PB ^TB ^GB ^MB ^KB
    1. Re:Only 1 TB? by cheezedawg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The "limiting factor" was AMD's decision to only use 40 bit addresses at first.

      --
      "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
  4. Re:32 compatibility mode vs. true 64 bit apps... by vlad_petric · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The width of the machine is not the number of threads it's able to run at a given time (SMT like P4), but the number of instructions you can execute in a cycle (in a parallel fashion, of course). The difference between x86 and Itanium is that on Itanium the instructions are "explicitly parallel", i.e. the compiler bundles instructions together and the processor knows it can execute them in parallel, while on x86 the processor is smarter and determines itself which
    micro-ops (actually it's rops for AMD) it can execute in parallel.

    You're very likely going to see speedups on 32 bit code, simply because Opteron is twice as wide as P4 (and this has nothing to do with the size of the operands, which probably is not going to matter as much).

    As far as the 64 apps are concerned - Linux already runs on it.

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    The Raven