AMD Cranks Up Opteron Clock Speeds

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Advanced Micro Devices has unexpectedly cranked up the clock speed a little on its 64-bit Opteron processors. While AMD did not officially provide clock speeds on the new Opteron 150 (for uniprocessor servers), Opteron 250 (for two-way servers), and Opteron 850 (for four-way and eight-way servers), the company is required to provide the speed as part of many benchmark tests. You can deduce the speed bump from this data.

Take the uniprocessor Opterons as an example. The initial Opteron 146 ran at 2 GHz, and with the Opteron 148 the speed was bumped up by 10 percent, to 2.2 GHz. The Opteron 150 has a clock speed of 2.4 GHz, an increase of 9 percent. The same speed bumps apply to the Opteron 250 and 850 processors, which run at the same speeds. On many workloads, that increased clock speed translates into a server, doing more work, if the remainder of the system (main memory and I/O) is balanced with some extra performance, too. (There are also slower Opterons, which run as slowly as 1.6 GHz.)

The Opteron 150, 250, and 850 processors are probably the last Opteron processors that will be made using the 130 nanometer process from AMD's chip plant in Dresden, Germany. During the third quarter of this year, AMD will begin pumping out chips using a new 90 nanometer process. The ramp up will probably take some time, however. Judging from experience, volume shipments for these 90 nanometer parts probably will not happen until the end of the year, maybe even early next year. It all depends on yields. (For a closer look at the AMD Opteron roadmap, see "Opteron Learning to Walk, Ready to Run".)

The Opteron 150 will start shipping in mid-June and costs $637. The Opteron 250 is available now for $851, which is what AMD was charging for the Opteron 248 before a price cut a few weeks ago. The Opteron 850 costs $1,514, about 30 percent more than the Opteron 848. That extra 9 percent performance comes at a pretty high cost. (All prices are for 1,000-unit quantities, which is the custom in the X86 processor business.)