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AMD Opteron 250 to ship early 2004

Whatever it's called, it runs at 2.4GHz

The AMD Opteron 250 should ship early next year, if a Canadian high performance computing specialist's next major launch is anything to go by.

Little-known - to us, at any rate - British Columbia-based hardware company OctigaBay will ship its recently announced OctigaBay 12K 12-CPU machine "commercially... early in 2004", it says in a press release issued on Tuesday and pointed out to us by a number of eagle-eyed Reg readers.

The OctigaBay 12K is a rack-mount unit containing 12 Opterons running Linux. There are 12 "specialised communications processors" and a "1Tbps embedded switching fabric" linking the CPUs, and the company has squeezed in a further six field-programmable gate array chips for "application acceleration". The machine supports 24-96GB of PC3200 DDR registered ECC SDRAM per machine - or 2-8GB per processor.

Together they yield 58 gigaflops, OctigaBay claims. Better still, a dozen OctigaBay 12K units can be connected in a single rack to create a system capable of churning out calculations at a rate of 691 gigaflops. The company reports SpecInt_base2000 and SpecFP_base2000 ratings of 1440 and 1404 on a per-2.4 GHz basis, respectively.

But here's the key fact. According to the company's OctigaBay 12K tech specs, each Opteron "200 series" chip is clocked at 2.4GHz.

The current top-end Opteron 200 series chip, the 246, is clocked at 2GHz, if a recent AMD presentation we saw is anything to go by. Since the clock speed goes up by 0.2GHz with every two-unit rise in the product name's final digit, the as-yet-unavailable Opteron 248 should clock at 2.2GHz. Logically, then, the mysterious 2.4GHz Opteron mentioned by OctigaBay ought to be the 250.

And since the 12K is shipping in volume early next year, so too must the 250. ®

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