AMD Debuts Dual-Core Opteron, Athlon

AMD Debuts Dual-Core Opteron, Athlon
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
April 21, 2005, 11:48 AM

As expected, AMD officially launched its dual-core Opteron processors for high-end servers Thursday at an event in New York City. The company is also preparing a dual-core desktop processor dubbed the AMD Athlon 64 X2, which will launch in June and go head to head with Intel's dual-core Pentium chips.

The 800 Series Opteron is available now and designed for four- to eight-way servers, while the 200 Series processors aimed at two-way servers and workstations will ship late May.

By packing two CPU cores onto a single chip die, AMD claims its new Opterons offer up to a 90 percent performance boost. The company says its dual-core chips use the same power and infrastructure as their single-core brethren, meaning a new chipset will not be required - only a BIOS upgrade.

Intel's dual-core chips, on the other hand, will require new motherboards with supporting chipset.

"Because our non-disruptive dual-core architecture is designed to fit in today’s existing infrastructure and provide leading- edge performance, enterprise customers can rapidly adopt AMD64 dual-core processors for servers and workstations today and for client platforms in June," said Marty Seyer, AMD corporate vice president, in Thursday's announcement.

With pressure from rival Intel, which launched its consumer-oriented dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition for desktop PCs earlier this week, AMD pushed forward its dual-core releases. Analysts and industry watchers hyped up the race, saying AMD . . .
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