Start-up Could Kick Opteron into Overdrive

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that a new start-up, DRC Computer, has created a reprogrammable co-processor that can slot directly into Opteron sockets. This new product has the potential to boost the Opteron chips well ahead of their Xeon-based competition. From the article: 'Customers can then offload a wide variety of software jobs to the co-processor running in a standard server, instead of buying unique, more expensive types of accelerators from third parties as they have in the past.'"

Comments

Open protocols win!

[maxwell demon]

I think the most important sentence in the article is this:

AMD's decision to open Hypertransport could end up being a key factor in Opteron's future success.

Analog data analysis and general calculus, IMO

[CFD339]

The sweet spot for plug in like this, IMO, would be similar to what you see a few board manufacturers doing now -- digital signal processing routines like Fourier transforms and other general calculus functions that are used in all kinds of data analysis where raw data comes in as analog variations, or where the moment by moment changes in state need to be modeled for engineering applications like fluid dynamics and harmonics.

I'd imagine you'll need to have the application compiled in such a way that it is aware of the additional processing capability, so its not likely to be a plug-n-pray solution to your general game player's graphical wet dreams.