Quote from theplumber:
I'm going to keep this an Opteron story only, have a new found distrust for sharing information with people after one of my ideas/suggestions was marketed and sold by someone about 6 months ago.
The history of the Opteron is the guys who made the Alpha chip left disenchanted by Intel when they bought the division and came to work for AMD. Intel really only wanted to bury the name and collect the customers but did use one peice of intellectual property called EPIC, which they modeled their Itanic (sic) proccessors after. They DISCARDED the rest thinking they were bigger than the market and would make the market swing their way ecomomically , WRONG. The market was over saturated and the MARKET dictated a cheaper but more powerful line of cpu's and real innovation. So the geniuses that made the Opteron brought with them what was on the drawing board for Alpha, this is from a Jan 1999 article.
" Now that Intel and Samsung manufacture Alpha processors, the timeline for production of 21264 systems has accelerated. The 21264 will appear in three distinct technologies: 0.35, 0.25, and 0.18 microns. Performance increases and cost reductions will accompany each new implementation.
Alpha's next generations, 21364 and 21464 chips, are already on Compaq's drawing boards. Plans beyond the 21464 are as open as the Alpha architecture. Future Alpha chips might include copper technologies, fully depleted Silicon On Insulator (SOI) multiple CPUs per chip, and a technology similar to Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC). Compaq and Samsung plan to keep Alpha machines at least twice as fast as and less expensive than their IA64 counterparts. (For a performance comparison of several generations of Alpha and Intel processors, see the sidebar "The Performance Curve.") Alpha processors will be viable into the next century. They will offer benefits for users who need top performance or want to migrate to a mature 64-bit platform today."
You see the dual core design was part of the Opteron design from the start, and Hypertransport was the second technology after the core design to make this all work. You will only know how much better your machine is when you put a load on, I mean a realworld load, if you even can tax it that much for a long period of time. This is what the Opteron was designed for, HUGE loads with multicores. And to tell the future, well I'll just leave this screenshot. Don't ask b/c I won't tell, but will say you have no idea what is coming ..... and fast.