AMD Quad-core Opteron Models Unveiled

Quad-core AMD Opteron 8000-series and 2000-series will initially use the Barcelona core. AMD will ship quad-core Opteron processors in SE, vanilla and HE models. All Opteron 8000 and 2000-series processors include SE, vanilla and HE models share similar attributes. Each processor core will have access to its own 512KB of L2 cache for a combined total of 2MB. L3 cache is new to the Barcelona-core Opteron models — a shared pool of 2MB of L3 cache is available to all four cores.

It looks as though AMD really wants to give the consumer a lot of fine tuning over their CPUs. How so? In their 8000 series, they have four different CPUs which are identical except for the clock speed. They begin at 2.1GHz and sequentially rise to 2.4GHz. Seems strange, but I guess it’s a matter of how far your wallet will stretch. Note that these are not meant to be enthusiast chips either. Their stock DDR2 speed of 667 proves that. Either way, I wouldn’t complain about having one of these in my server.

Source: Daily Tech