Am I reading this correctly? AMD put out new 90nm Opterons?

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Non technical, but credible source

The source

Also, with a Clovertown at 50W and a Woodcrest at 40W, how is AMD's 68W Opteron the best energy efficient chip? I'm totally confused (please help me out, here!)

Because AMD's TDP is MAX. Thus, they run cooler for most of the time.

Intel's TDP rating scheme is shite.

These are part of the contracts that AMD has with the US government through DARPA/DOE/NSF. DARPA and NNSA rejected Intel core 2 and quad core designs for instruction decoder design (1 complex and 3 simple instruction decoders per core) and latency issues with DDR2/northbridge memory control. AM2 was rejected for latency issues that make it about 3-5% slower than 939/940 cpus. The 939/940 is the champion when it comes to scalablity. http://www.physorg.com/news82830306.html The Cray XT3 is the prefered supercomputer base design and will need 939's through at least 2009 when the XT4 (AM3/DDR3) should be fully available. The 65 watt full load is important because RedStorm uses 85 watt 939's and these cpu's would save about 500kw per hour of operation and then add reduced AC load. In California that would be $1m a year.

Since the US government only bought $1.2 billion in AMD based supercomputers for FY2007, it's called keeping the Customer satisfied.

Heck yah! this is awesome! Thanks for being so smart and providing the link case!!

I've wanted to mention this b4 how i feel AMD was able to milk ddr400 to the extreme! I mean seriously they squeezed every little drop (maybe the opty's are using ddr333 but i dunno)

500kw in savings?! save a million dollars a year by dropping 20 watts a cpu...this is good news!! I wondered why AMD wanted to move to ddr3 so quickly I thought they might have wanted to do the same thing they did with ddr and whip intels but with older (see cheaper) memory. But now i get it...think of the TFlops all this new stuff is going to allow...if AMD perfects AM3...i'm droolin i swear...

This could be interpreted as good news; that no matter how bad AMD may want to fully retire the 939 platform, they won't as long as they can still make a good wad of cash making them. I thought, and still think, there is a lot of potential life in 939 and I was sorry they abandoned it for the end user, but as long as one can still buy an Opty...