AMD high power Opterons discussed, dissected

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of confusion about the new 120W AMD parts. The short story is this, there are going to be some Opterons released that are one speed bump above the highest available on the open market, in this case 2.6GHz. To get to that speed it will increase the power consumed by 25W or so to 120W from the 95W TDP of the 2.4s.

Before you all rush out and buy them, they are for large OEMs only, kind of like the 68W blade parts. You can buy 95W and 55W products, but unless you are a box builder, 68W and 120W are not available.

The main reason behind this is it needs a new cooling and power infrastructure that is not found on most motherboards and cases. If you are building a box from the ground up, you can spec out more airflow and power, and it won't be a problem. Plug it in to a Tyan S2882 you have lying around, and suddenly it could be a problem. AMD doesn't want this, so it is only selling them to people that can deal with it.

Sun is currently the only taker, and the point of these chips is that they are for very task specific jobs. If you need higher single thread performance, there is really only one way to get it, and that's using faster CPUs, not more. This is a niche part for a niche market.

Next year, AMD will bump it up to 2.8, which is in keeping with its +1 speed grade philosophy. That means the 2.6 95W part is due at the same time. Won't this make for some fun benchmarking and FUD filled slideshows? µ