[PLUG] Athlon64 vs Opteron64

E. Rogan Creswick creswick at cs.orst.edu
Fri Mar 26 16:33:02 UTC 2004


AthlonRob writes:
 > would be very surprised if they added the additional HT links
 > necessary for running the chips in an SMP environment... they want
 > SMP users to pay the premium for the Opteron chips.  The difference

I was under the impression that the Opterons have the northbridge on
die, and that contributed greatly to the increased cost as you
progress up in the n-way chips (there are Opteron 14x, 24x, and 84x
chips for different cardinalities of SMP).  I also seem to recall that
the opterons have three times the I/O, ammounting in something like
12gbps bi-directional.  I found a good (seemingly unbiased) review at
anandtech comparing the opteron 244's with a dual 3ghz zeon, but I
can't locate it at the moment.

-Rogan

 > at that point between the Athlon64 and the AthlonFX, if the
 > AthlonFX survives that long, will likely simply be additional L2
 > cache, I suppose.
 > 
 > > Some of the newer Athlon64 chips have 512MB of cache instead of 1MB.  
 > 
 > s/512MB/512KB/  :-)
 > 
 > I think, again I'm not sure (AMD sure is full of no information as of
 > late) all the newer Athlon64's are moving to the half-meg of cache.
 > 
 > > These are currently relatively cheap for the performance you get.  
 > > Even with the missing memory bus, the memory bandwidth is reasonable 
 > > and the memory latency is quite nice.  The ability to use cheap, 
 > > off-the-shelf DDR400 RAM is nice.  If you need raw bandwidth, the FX 
 > > is more expensive, but faster than an Opteron.
 > 
 > I'd love an AthlonFX.  :-)
 > 
 > > This is about as concise as I can make it.  AMD isn't making things 
 > > very clear at all.  Perhaps their intention is to confuse us all to 
 > > the point where we just buy something :-)
 > 
 > Well, that strategy has worked for years at Intel....  :-)
 > 
 > Rob
 > 
 > 
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