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VIA K8T800 Chipset Preview - Dual Opteron in Action

Posted by timothy on from the more-than-you-can-shake-a-stick-at dept.

Mr.Tweak writes "It has been a long time coming but we are finally reaching the beginning stages of 64-bit mainstream computing. AMD has been the first to bring a 64-bit processor to the market with any true support in the Opteron. VIA is one of the key chipset companies supporting AMD64 and today TweakTown takes a preview look at their new K8T800 chipset with AMD Opteron 242 and 244 processors. 64-bit computing is boarding - don't miss the train!"

5 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. 64-bit computing is just now boarding? by Surak · · Score: 5, Informative

    Where have you been? I've had a 64-bit machine for almost 5 years now. ;) It's even been EOLed since July 2002.

    --
    My journal has hot /. gossip.
  2. C'T Review by gmania · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a nice review in the latest german C'T too (issue 18 - page 36) of the MSI K8T Master2FAR board with dual opteron support, Via K8T800/VT8237 chipset and a lot of nice features (AGP, SATA, GBit Ethernet). Size constaints meant only a single memory-bus is implemented, a 5-10% speed bump on memory access. Another downside is no PCI-X slots.

    The nicest thing though is the price: 280 euros. Sounds like a good workstation board.

    1. Re:C'T Review by DarkSarin · · Score: 5, Informative

      go for this the s2885 from tyan. It has PCI-X, AGP, SATA, GBe, and hold 16GB RAM... Can't lose.

      --
      "We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
  3. Re:Well. by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the relatively small number of programs (at least on Linux) that have trouble with 64-bit longs, just compile as i386 code. The Opteron is backwards compatible with 32-bit code and gets reasonable performance out of it.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  4. Re:Well. by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

    The really useful thing about the Opteron isn't the 64-bit aspect, but the fact that in 64-bit mode you get a lot more registers, etc, to play with. This in turn means that code compiled for the 64-bit mode will run faster than the code compiled for the 32-bit mode. Also the on-die memory controller means that memory latency is much lower, which in turn means things run faster. I'd buy a dual Opteron machine over a dual Xeon machine anyday.