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.