AMD readies Opteron for launch

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has made itself into a consistent thorn in Intel's side with its Athlon XP desktop processors over the last few years, but hasn't made much headway against Intel's popular Xeon processors and notorious Itanium 2 processors for servers. On Tuesday, the company will unveil its Opteron server chip, which puts a new twist on a familiar technology.

The Opteron's launch event in New York comes after almost a year's worth of hype and promise from AMD. Based on the company's Hammer architecture, the processor uses 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set to allow users to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same chip. Chips for one-way, two-way, and four-way servers will be available on April 22, said Marty Seyer, vice president of marketing for AMD's server business, during an interview at Linuxworld in January.

A 64-bit processor uses wider general purpose registers than a 32-bit processor. A general purpose register is a place on the processor where data is temporarily stored as it is processed, a holding spot for data before it gets moved to another space within the processor.

The wider general purpose register can allow up to twice as much data to be processed by a 64-bit chip in the same clock cycle as a 32-bit processor, said Kevin Krewell, senior editor at the Microprocessor Report in San Jose, Calif. It can accommodate a 64-bit wide instruction, whereas a 32-bit processor would need two clock cycles to process that same instruction, he said.

Database managers also like 64-bit processors because they can address more memory than 32-bit processors can handle. Current 32-bit systems are hamstrung by a 4GB limit in the amount of RAM a system can address at any one time. This isn't a problem for most desktop users, who rarely need that ability to run current applications. However, servers with 64-bit chips can hold enormous amounts of data in larger memory banks, which increases the speed at which that data can be processed.

Databases will be the primary application for the Opteron, at least at first. At Comdex last November, IBM and AMD showed a demonstration of IBM's DB2 database software running on the Opteron, and IBM announced beta availability of that database for the Opteron at Linuxworld.

Microsoft is expected to release a version of SQL Server for the Opteron, Krewell said, coming off that company's announcement that it will release a version of Windows Server 2003 for the chip. Microsoft's recent decision to make its current 64-bit version of SQL Server the same price as the 32-bit version makes it an attractive proposition for IT managers that already use the 32-bit version and are considering the Opteron, Krewell said.

"They can get more benefit out of SQL Server without it costing anything else," he said.