Opteron S940 roadmap...

[brankob]

I am thinking of upgrading 240 Opterons on my Tyan K8W/K8WE motherboards and want to cach optimal moment.

I have existing setup for some 3+ years and I'm quite satisfied, 240s aren't exactly slow even by todays standards.

Still, dual cores will rule the world and S940 being slowly phased out, I wan't to get latest/fastest/meanest DC chips for S940 I can, so I can stay current for next few years with S940 and DDR400.

Googling didn't find any usefull roadmap, neither did browsing through AMD's materials.

Does anyone have some useful data ? Which is maximal planned freq for DC S940 Opteron ? Will it be available in 65 nm ?

[steveb]

Look here

They are not 65nm.

Some of the new CPU's (stepping F for example) are not compatible with the old S940.

Maybe looking here helps to clearify some issues?


cheers

SteveB

[brankob]

Thanks for the info, but both links are dealing with existing models, not new ones that are about to come.

There was some talk on anandtech etc about K8L and K8 rev.G that is about to come, so I wondered if there are plans for anything on 65 nm on S940 (K8 revG or K8L, albeight later is less probable)...

[paulisdead]

I don't think amd will get anything 65nm out the door this year iirc, or at least till the late year. The real question is would you really benefit from having four cores on your system? You'd have to be doing something that requires a lot of cpu power and is able to be broken down into that many threads in order for that many cores to really be able to help. It would be a cheaper upgrade path than intel's conroe core (plus whatever the xeon equivalent was called), for you since you've already got the mobo and ram to go with it, but intel seems to be spanking AMD with their newer cores. I'd say since you've probably got 2 procs in that mobo of yours already, to check and see if having four cores would even help significantly for what you're doing before really considering upgrading.
_________________
"we should make it a law that all geeks have dates" - Linus

[brankob]

Many cores would help me significantly. Since Intel has priced their multicores _VERY_ agressively, I'm expecting Opteron prices to plummet in a month or two.

I don't need absolutely meanest and fastest CPU. I want to make significant upgrade for reasonable price and don't care if intel is now a couple tens of % faster than AMD within fastest class, which I don't care to pay for, anyway...
I want to have tangible benefit from Intel's atack even if I stay on AMD.

I took that combo ( TYAN's MB and Opterons 240), since Tyan's MoBo's were competitively priced ( similar MoBo for Intel would cost about the same, if not more), but since Intel's Xeons couldn't come close to Opteron, fater models of the latter were madly expensive. 240s were relatively speaking _VERY_ fast at the time, compared to anything similarly priced, so I took those and expected to make an upgrade when Intel mounts significant attack and Opteron prices drop.

Intel's Core 2 duo came more or less when expected and even optimal for me- right before phasing out of S940. I am hoping that S940 will see a couple of new models before "lights are out".
I'm in no hurry with upgrade, I just want to catch the right moment- to get the best model for S940, but preferably not "still hot from the manufacturing press", but from the last available batches.

Latest dual cores get up to 2.6 Ghz and I was kinda hoping that I would upgrade to at least 100% faster core (2.8 Ghz or more), so I'm targeting 290 or 295 if it gets out, but really would be very satisfied with 285 as it is. I just don'f feel like paying $1000 for the chip...

Regarding Core 2 Duo vs Opteron, I don't think existing benchmarks show Opteron's strength. HT links are very good reasn to use AMD as anyone running fast server knows.
So for me and my applications performance gap between Conroe and Opteron is more narrow. maybe even AMD still leads...

So, this Core 2 Duo attack and existing public benchmarks work in my favor. They show Amd64 waekaer than it is ( for my purposes), so markets response will be low prices.
If amd64 prices go down, corresponding Opterons prices will have to go down also, so...