Comdex 2002 Wrapup - AMD, NVIDIA & Transmeta

Opteron

By far the biggest push from AMD is on making Opteron the success it could be on the server side of things.

A 4-way Opteron running at 1.4GHz

AMD has published estimated SPEC benchmarks of the Opteron and compared it to Xeon, where the Opteron measures up quite favorably. We asked AMD if they honestly felt that this would translate into real world performance (e.g. our DB server tests) and they responded with an interesting "we feel that the SPEC numbers are a bit conservative." Quite bold claims from a company that hasn't yet demoed a system above 1.4GHz but their confidence was quite inspiring and interestingly enough, believable.

A 1U 1P Opteron Server - Click to Enlarge

We'll see what happens come crunch-time but we rest assured that the hardware behind Opteron is there, it's merely a question of if they can get it out and in great enough quantities.