Socket F Opterons are here

The news is nothing we haven't written up for a long time, the names are new-ish, the short recap is that 8xx goes to 82xx, 2xx to 22xx, and 1xx ends up at 12xx. Pricing is about where it should be, the 8218 is $2149, 2218 is $873 and the lowly 1218 is $749.

In a strange twist, AMD has seen fit to lose all speed ratings from their CPUs, a move that earned Intel much love from the unwashed masses. Yoo-hoo, AMD, this is REALLY ANNOYING.

The big thing is that the new CPUs bring DDR2 to the game - vastly higher bandwidths at the cost of higher latencies. Performance generally goes up a tad, but nothing huge, and power goes down a tad, but again, don't expect miracles.

The ranges you will see are 2.0 to 2.6GHz for the 82xx line, and the 22xx adds a low end 1.8GHz model as well. They come in 68W and 95W SKUs, and there is also an SE model at 2.8GHz with a 120W envelope should you want it. A more interesting tidbit is that all Opterons are now dual core, single core has gone the way of the 32-bit CPU, to the historical dustbin. From this day on, all new Opterons are now dual at least, and in a year quad cored.

The most interesting thing is the launch of Pacifica/AMD-V, basically hardware virtualization support. You can read up on it and the Intel equivalent, Vanderpool starting here. (...and continuing 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Basically, both sides now have virtualisation in hardware, but Pacifica has been scaled back a tad. Many of the memory controller tricks have been put on hold for a future revision. That said, DEV and the tagged TLB are still there, so AMD expects it's flavour to handily outperform the Intel version.

There is a long series of tests that AMD put out comparing the Opteron 82xx to the P4 based Intel something (I can't remember the names anyway, not that they matter with the way Intel, and now AMD names things), both 4S systems. Because the Intel box is not based on the new core, and won't be for about a year, the Opterons abuse it thoroughly in all measures. The take-home message, if you are doing virtualisation at the 4S level, go green.

I have yet to see a 2S equivalent of the same test, and to me, that is where the interesting fight will be. Without the memory controller fully virtualised, it won't be a clean kill for AMD, but I doubt it will be as much of a win for Intel either.

One other tidbit is that Opterons are adding a good deal of RAS features to the mix. The new memory controller adds online spare memory and address parity protection. The online spare is just that, there is an extra DIMM so if the memory controller hits a certain error threshold, it will disable the bum one and turn on the good one. This is probably aimed at the supercomputer set more than anything else. Address parity just adds a bit more protection to memory subsystem.

So, overall, new Opterons, new name, new memory new features, and a slight performance kick. Nothing huge, nothing earth shattering, just another step in the grand march forward. It is a little better, a little faster, and, finally, it is out. µ