AMD Opteron
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| Produced | From April 2003 to present |
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| Common manufacturer(s) |
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| Max. CPU clock rate | 1.4 GHz to 3.5 GHz |
| HyperTransport speeds | 800 MHz to 3200 MHz |
| Min. feature size | 130 nm to 28 nm |
| Instruction set | x86-64, ARMv8-A |
| Cores | 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 & 16 |
| Socket(s) | |
Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core (K8) and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same segment as the Intel Xeon processor. Processors based on the AMD K10 microarchitecture (codenamed Barcelona) were announced on September 10, 2007 featuring a new quad-core configuration. The most-recently released Opteron CPUs are the Piledriver-based Opteron 4300 and 6300 series processors, codenamed "Seoul" and "Abu Dhabi" respectively. In January 2016, the first ARMv8-A based Opteron SoC was released.
Opteron combines two important capabilities in a single processor:
The first capability is notable because at the time of Opteron's introduction, the only other 64-bit architecture marketed with 32-bit x86 compatibility (Intel's Itanium) ran x86 legacy-applications only with significant speed degradation. The second capability, by itself, is less noteworthy, as major RISC architectures (such as SPARC, Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC, MIPS) have been 64-bit for many years. In combining these two capabilities, however, the Opteron earned recognition for its ability to run the vast installed base of x86 applications economically, while simultaneously offering an upgrade-path to 64-bit computing.
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Wikipedia