Mixed feelings

According to the xbit labs game benchmarks i think it would be an excelent gaming machine, albeit expensive. Amd has expressed concern that the opteron might be looked at as a gaming machine though, since corporations might think if its good for games it cant be such a great server machine. and im not too sure about rendering scores, its way too early to tell final opteron performance with opteron since it was done in 32 bit os with 32 bit apps, and also there is no word as to if the programs even identify the opteron as having sse2 enabled, and im sure that [-peep-] trident chip had atleast a little something to do with it.

Ahh where to start.

First of all, it is not that hard to port a game to 64-bit. The makers of UT2k3 have already stated it is a rather harmless switch to port the code to 64 bit, only requiring little amounts of time.

There is absolutely no reason for the Opteron or athlon64 to handle 32 bit codes poorly, havent you been reading the reviews? Opteron and Athlon64 still retain all 32-bit functionality of the XP, there are no cutbacks, and the Athlon runs 32 bit code faster clock for clock.

Agp does not mess up Hypertransport at all. Agp will go straight through the Hypertransport line and requires no special optimizations, just that motherboards with no agp contain no agp tunneling chip. Opteron mainboards contain no agp right now because the version they are selling now is strict sevrer work, servers have no need for anything but onboard video. There are numberous chipsets already announced which contain agp ports and have special optimizations for CAD cards.

How do you about price/performance? Do you own an opteron or Athlon64? Do you have an opteron board with an agp slot? Do you know how Athlon64 will be priced?

And in regards to the heat comment, see paragraph above, nobody has given any straight information in regards to opteron temperatures. The only regards to opteron cooling we know is Newisys saying it is cool and asking customer to touch the cpu to feel that it is cool as to help win them over. ace has also hinted to the Opterons cool temperature in his Opteron article

As to the question of heat and the Opteron...

They integrated a copper heat spreader, and the core is larger, thus a larger area to disperse heat. Also, running at 1.6gzh, I doubt it gets more than warm with good stock cooling.

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Still another thing to remember, dual setups are not the best when it comes to games, but hopefully more games will allow SMP support so we can actually have benchies with 4 opteron setups

Interestingly, it uses simple HS on it, and distant mini-fans to cool it. That is still a good sign nonetheless.

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what im worried about is, sinse its based on teh Athlon ALOT (the review says its merely an AXp with ondie memory controller, the new 64bit and sse2 support, and more cache)

wont it be Mhz limited? because the Athlon has pretty much met its limit now...

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But it also has SOI and the longer pipelines which indicate higher attainable clockspeed, but the exact numbers of how much that helps is not introduced right now

I know games don't benefit much, but quantum simulations sure as hell will.

Hilbert space is a big place.

I thought that the P4 was initially released at 1.5GHz and reduced in speed afterwords...

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