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AMD to demo dual-core Opteron box

Eight cores in a Socket 940 machine

AMD will make the first public demonstration of a system built out of its dual-core processors today, the result of a strategy first made public almost a year ago.

Two-core Opteron chips aren't due to ship until the middle of 2005, but AMD will be have four of the parts running inside a usually four-way HP ProLiant DL585 server at its Austin plant later today.

AMD has the advantage of having designed its AMD64 processor from the ground up with dual-core implementations in mind. The current Opteron - and Athlon 64, for that matter - architecture defines two physical cores - CPU 0 and CPU 1 - both of which can be connected to the chip's HyperTransport bus and memory managers.

Today's demo is intended to show how easy it will thus be to whip out your old Opterons and swap in some brand spanking new dual-core ones this time next year. AMD has yet to ship 90nm single-core Opterons, but they're coming later this year and like the dual-core versions - also to be fabbed at 90nm - they will be based on existing Socket 940 infrastructure.

So what today might be an eight-way server will potentially become, mid-2005, an "eight socket" server with 16 processing cores.

Dual-core Athlon 64s are set to ship sometime during the second half of next year. ®

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