Dual core Opteron 'gets 30 and 55 per cent' performance boost

By Steve Malone

Posted on 6 Oct 2004 at 09:35

AMD has released the first performance figures for its forthcoming dual core Opteron processor. At a speech at the Fall Processor Forum, the company's Manager of the Opteron architecture, Kevin McGrath says that the company was seeing an increase of between 30 and 55 per cent over existing models.

In addition, McGrath promised that the new generation of dual core Opterons would be the same size and generate no more waste heat than today's versions of the chip which means that manufacturers will be able to slot the processor into existing designs.

To keep the heat down and power consumption under 95 Watts, AMD is saying that the chip will be underclocked. However, the company pointed out that a dual-core, dual-processor system clocked at only three speeds slower than the fastest equivalent unicore AMD dual processor system will perform between 130 to 160 percent faster.

The company says it is still on course to deliver the chips for between one and eight processor servers in mid 2005 with desktop versions following shortly after.

Each core will contain 1MB of Level 2 cache. Memory requests will be piped to a system request interface via a crossbar switch. For the first versions both cores will share a single memory controller although AMD says that future versions will have two or maybe more controllers. In the first version the memory controller will access 128-bit DDR-1 memory alongside three HyperTransport links to the rest of the system.