AMD has kept its word and has launched its Socket F Opteron chips. The new Socket brings DDR2 to AMD’s server market and not much more. The new line of CPU’s will all be dual core, and will run a bit faster, cooler, and on less power. AMD changed the naming convention a bit as the 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.
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.
Source: The Inquirer
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