Sun rises on AMD's new Opterons

dvanced Micro Devices got a vote of support from Sun Microsystems and added three new models to its stable of 64-bit Opteron processors for servers.

The chipmaker, which announced a partnership with Sun Microsystems at this week's Comdex trade show, launched the new Opterons--models 148, 248 and 848--early Monday. The new models, which run at 2.2GHz, represent an increase in performance for the chip family. Sun said in a statement that it will introduce two- and four-processor Sun Fire servers, which contain the chip, over the course of 2004. Meanwhile, AMD hopes the Opteron and the Sun partnership will work as a fulcrum that catapults its revenue by winning more business from corporations. To date, the chip has seen a string of wins in supercomputers and also high-performance computing clusters.

IBM offers the Opteron chip in one of its servers, designed mainly for clusters. Bringing Sun on board would likely increase the availability of more generalized business servers based on Opteron, adding more weight to the chip's do-it-all approach. The chip, introduced earlier this year, can run 32-bit or 64-bit software. Most applications and operating systems are based on 32-bit addressing, and a switch to 64 bits would boost the performance of databases and other applications by dramatically increasing the amount of memory available at any one time.

AMD's single-chip strategy for servers differs from Intel's, which offers separate chips for 32-bit and 64-bit servers. But because Opteron servers can run both 32-bit and 64-bit software and cost about the same as 32-bit Intel servers, AMD argues that machines with its chip can help companies save money by not having to upgrade to new, more expensive gear when making the switch to 64 bits.

News source: C|net