Yesterday AMD rolled out Opteron, its brand-new 64-bit CPU architecture. Opteron offers the first real bridge from the 32-bit to the 64-bit world. Even better, this sucker is fast! AMD is putting Opteron up against Intel’s Xeon. Natively,Opteron CPUs carry out conventional 32-bit x86 code eventhough they are 64-bit CPUs. Because of this, Opteron is able to run the existing 32-bit software as well as the 64-bit code. AMD’s HyperTransport Channels are also debuting. AMD’s dream for accessing data through an ultrafast conduit have come to life in HyperTransport. “The serial interface with a variable bitrate allows the SledgeHammer to attain a data transfer rate of 3.2 GB/s - in both directions simultaneously. This results in a total bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s per HyperTransport port. By comparison, the Pentium 4 with 533 MHz FSB allows a maximum data throughput of 3.97 GB/s - but not in both directions simultaneously.”(Tom’s Hardware Guide) If you would notice, the trend in technological advances are all moving towards the serial bus. A 2GHz Opteron was slated to be released, but the company has not committed to releasing the chip at that speed. It is believed that a chip running between 2GHz and 2.4GHz would be marketed with a 3400+ performance number and have a core speed of roughly 1.7GHz. This would be a lower core speed and higher equivalency speed than their Barton chip. I’m expecting big things to come.
- Some points on HyperTransport
- HyperTransport? technology is a new high speed, high performance point-to-point link for interconnecting integrated circuits on a motherboard. It can be significantly faster than a PCI bus for an equivalent number of pins.
- This technology is primarily targeted for the IT and Telecom industries, but any application where high speed, low latency and scalability is necessary can potentially take advantage of HyperTransport technology.
- HyperTransport is planned to bring the computation experience to a new level.
- Helps reduce the number of buses while providing a high-performance link for PCs, workstation and servers, as well as numerous embedded applications and highly scalable multiprocessing systems.
Sources
Duel of the Titans: Opteron vs. Xeon
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