Early AMD Opterons - there's only 500 available

EARLIER WE MENTIONED AMD's "Beachhead" project - no doubt the Polywell systems we revealed earlier this week were a leak as part of the strategy.

That much is evident from an AMD document we saw in London yesterday evening.

AMD says that Beachhead is a market development programme which seeds strategic system builders (SSBs) with Opterons prior to their launch, in a bid to increase customer demand for the Sledgehammer chip.

But AMD warns that such systems are pre-production units and customers should be warned of this, meaning that they have limited warranties.

Beachhead products will indeed use the Newisys Khepri platform, an enterprise level platform up to tier one standards.

And the system builders are to buy the Opterons directly from Sanmina SCI. That, readers will recall, is the firm that snapped up a huge chunk of IBM's business only yesterday.

The system builders are expected to sell such systems to end users for software development and evaluation work, but AMD is warning that they are not intended for benchmarking, because final production machines will produce different results.

It's not final production hardware for processors and for chipsets, AMD emphatically warns.

The systems very much resemble the Polywell specs we revealed earlier this week - 1U rack mounted servers, dual Opterons, up to eight GB of memory using 1GB DIMMs, and 16GB when 2GB DIMMs go into production, using 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux beta, a product version of Windows 2000, a beta version of .net server and - most importantly - the pre-alpha version of Windows AMD 64 (64-bit).

And AMD warns Beachhead systems are only for builders who can give level one and two support structures, have strong server customer bases, well trained engineers, and want strong advanced systems management. It rules out system builders who can't meet these criteria.

Khepri based systems come in two configurations which are dual Opterons running at 1.4GHz, eight by one GB DIMMs, one 36GB 15K RPM Ultra 320 hard drive, and with an approximate cost of $10,750.

The second configuration, which AMD calls "Edge of Network Servers" also have two Opterons at 1.4GHz, use four 512MB DIMMs, have a similar hard drive and come at an approximate cost of just under $8,000.

AMD says that system integrators should be aware that there are only 500 development platforms.

The first units will ship at the end of January, while the last units will ship in the middle of February.

Once the 500 systems have been seeded, there will be no further systems available until the official launch of the Opteron in March/April. µ

See Also
How AMD views Newisys and Khepri
AMD creates Beachhead for Opteron programme