AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 1: Intro to Opteron/K8 Architecture

Opteron Chipsets

We have seen a plethora of chipsets for the forthcoming Athlon 64, but for Opteron there didn't seem to be that much support outside of AMD's own solution.

The AMD 8000 series works just as well with the Opteron as it will with the Athlon 64, and that's the chipset you'll see on virtually all Opteron based systems. Because AMD is focusing this launch on the enterprise market, none of the current Opteron boards feature AMD's 8151 AGP Tunnel, thus we have no AGP slots on any of the Opteron boards we have our hands on.

The AMD-8111 HyperTransport I/O Hub (aka South Bridge)

The AMD-8131 HyperTransport PCI-X Tunnel