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

A bit more accurate summary

[subreality]

They basically made a FPGA (field programmable gate array) that can plug directly into HyperTransport (the Opteron CPU bus). FPGAs let you efficiently solve many problems that a general purpose processor can't. This has been done with PCI cards before, but the PCI is too slow for many uses. Giving it direct access to HT solves that problem.

That's a pretty cool niche.