AS ONE MIGHT guess, today's HW Roundup is almost exclusively dedicated to the release of AMD's Dual core opteron.
Grand Daddy Anand offers preview of the Ulei susan and a preview of the forthcoming June-Bound X2 4400+ in a series of server-based and office benchmarks respectively. Many lessons are to be learnt. From the fact that Opterons motherboards are probably the weak link to the remarkable jump in performance AMD obtained by just gluing another CPU. Unfortunately, AMD's DC processors will be much more expensive than Intel ones.
Firingsquad has not one but two reviews for us. The first one is about the Opteron x75 series. AMD adopts a top to bottom approach which differs from Intel. The second one is about a dual DC opteron from server maker Colfax. They introduce a new series of benchmarks including photographic ones as well as video. For both reviews left Firingsquad ecstatic and looking for more.
By the way, Chip-Architech first evoked the Dual core possibility wayback in September 2000 in an article called "Is SledgeHammers dual core double pumped?"
Armani is already selling them. A Quad AMD Opteron 865 DC running at 1.8GHz (eight cores in all) will cost you a cool £6725+VAT. It is based on a 2U Base server from Tyan,the Transport TX46 and has 4GB of PC3200 REG ECC memory and a 73.5GB U320 Hard disk. The 875 DC version will cost you a cool £9965+VAT. Hexus has a review based on this one here. Dell, in an orange to apple comparison, sells a quad Xeon MP with 512KB L2 and 1MB L3 cache for £5054+VAT with 3 yrs onsite support.
Techreport also tested AMD's newest baby and boy they love it. They call it "technical elegance" and reckon that AMD has executed very impressively. Fundamentaly though, it will be a single-thread vs multi-thread decision. As usual, what you do will determine your processor choice. They have pitted the new opterons against the old opterons and against single and Dual Xeons, the Pentium version D, normal and EE. The most extensive test out there.
German website Tecchannel stays one click ahead of Tomshardware.de with their test of the AMD Opteron 875. Mostly professional benchmarks, highlighting AMD's target market. Here again, AMD is the winner in most tests.
Gundeep Hora from Cooltechzone reports that AMD may skip DDR3 altogether in order to get sufficient bandwidth for its future generation processors, which will make sense when DC becomes mainstream. Will Intel follow suit?
Last but certainly not least, iWill unveilled a 8-way solution for the AMD Opteron platform. The H8501 is an Octal Processor Server which can scale up to 16 processors, giving it a huge 32 cores onboard. The YH8501 is made up of the QK8S-8P motherboard.
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