64-bit goodness
Well, the Opteron is out, and early indications are that it screams. The SPEC numbers are great, with the 244 (at 1.8 GHz) beating the 2.8 GHz Xeon in every benchmark, and with integer performance beating the Itanium. The FP numbers lose to the Itanium at less than 4 processors, where the Opteron catches up. The SpecWeb number beat everyone at all levels. On the whole, it looks promising. Other benchmarks are not out yet (or at least the one I’ve been able to find is slashdotted), so it’s a bit hard to tell, but I’m optimistic.
Update:
Well, I’ve managed to read the benchmarks, and I’m quite happy with the Opteron performance. Dispite being 1.2 GHz slower, it consistantly beats the top-of-the-line Xeon in server based tests, especially in 64-bit mode. On Workstation tests (running 32-bit Windows XP), it’s not stellar. Some of them are quite poor, which is odd. It should be on par with the lower end Athlons in the test at least, and it’s not. This makes me think it might be a pre-release hardware issue. Still, 64-bit mode, with it’s higher register count, is quite fast. I’m highly optimistic that the Athlon64 (which should have higher clock speed) will be a great workstation processor.
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