Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron

Although Xeon doesn't seem to have anything interesting going on these days, AMD has a lot of neat tidbits in the works. For starters, Socket 939 Opterons are already shipping to some OEMs, so expect to see those in high end workstations in the near future. It's probably going to be several months before these chips show up in the retail channel, but do expect to see those soon. To us, it appears as though AMD is just trying to reduce overlapping FX/Opteron 1xx SKUs.

The Opteron 154, 254 and 854 launch is also coming soon and some OEMs have already started promising chips to their customers. The new chips will run at 2.8GHz and utilize 1MB of L2 cache. All chips will be Socket 940 with the exception of the 1xx Opterons which will show up on Socket 939 instead. For those interested in buying a Socket 939 Opteron, you may want to consider a similarly priced Athlon 64 or even an FX chip. The price on the 939 Opterons is very prohibitive right now and will continue to be that way for a few months.

Movement on the new Opteron chips was non-existent over the last several months; although the Opteron 252 Troy [RTPE: OSA252FAA5BL] took a huge drop in price recently - mostly in part to the availability of OEM unboxed processors.

Don't expect any big changes this week for Xeon processors. There were a few small dips in Iriwindale processors here and there, but for the most part there was nothing worth commenting on this week in Xeon-land.

Celeron & Pentium M
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  • ryanv12 - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    #5 - you sound extremely pro-AMD with that statement, and you probably are.

    I didn't detect any subtle pro-intel remarks in this article at all. If you notice, Kris recommends against a Prescott processor. I'm afraid I don't see the bias here...
  • JGunther - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    "Intel is currently pumping out dual core processors in all of their fabs; AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden is the only facility AMD has prepared for dual core production."

    Sigh, Kris... could you try any harder to make it sound like AMD is struggling with dual-core chip production?

    Of course Intel is going to have more fabs producing dual-core chips: they have more fabs, period. Fab30 is THE chip production facility for AMD: Fab 25 is used for flash memory production, and Fab 36 hasn't yet entered production.

    The fact that AMD is only producing X2s out of Fab30 is NO SURPRISE AT ALL, and I can't for the life of me figure out why you even mentioned it other than to try to put AMD down.

    Just one of the many little sentences in this article that are subtly pro-Intel when they shouldn't be.
  • KristopherKubicki - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    Sorry about that Rand. The tables are generated on keywords and apparently I didnt have the right keywords for the XE chips. It should show up now.

    Kristopher
  • Rand - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    I'd be mildly interested to see the results of the P4 580 relative to the 3.73GHz EE should it ever pass through your hands.

    Speaking of the P4 EE. any reason why you didn't list it despite listing it's direct competitor in the A64 FX?
  • Rand - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    At $163 and $263 respectively the 3400+ and 3700+ S754 models aren't too badly priced for users that have an older 280+ A64 of which I suspect there are still a decent number.

    2.4GHz/512K or 2.4Ghz/1MB provides a reasoably respectable upgrade over a 1.8GHz/512K 2800+, at those priced I'm not sure you gain much by jumping to a similarly performing S939 processor and motherboard given the extra cost.

    For low end A64 S754 users that want something faster, unless they need the absolute highest single core performance (A64 FX/A64 4000+) or DualCore they may as well grab a 3400/3700+ S754 and use that to tide them over until Socket M2 hits... though that would require replacing the DRAM as well, but eventually they'd have to do that regardless.
  • vitamalt - Sunday, July 24, 2005 - link

    And my next upgrade will be? Who knows, gonna see how all this pans out after the "budget' X2 arrives.

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