PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

AMD Opteron and Athlon 64

By mid-2002, AMD was struggling to produce Athlons that could match Pentium 4 performance. By July 2003, it was obvious to nearly everyone that the Athlon XP had reached the end of the line and that the 3200+ would almost certainly be the final Athlon XP processor. AMD was able to push the Athlon core further than anyone expected, eventually reaching a core clock speed of 2.2 GHz in the Barton-core Athlon XP 3200+ model. AMD also expanded L2 cache from 256 KB on earlier cores to 512 KB on the Barton core, and increased FSB speeds from 266 MHz to 333 MHz and eventually to 400 MHz on the final Athlon XP models.

But all of these enhancements yielded only marginal performance improvements over earlier Athlon models. The real problem was that the Athlon core itself had reached its limits, while Intel’s Pentium 4 core wasn’t even breathing hard. AMD badly needed an entirely new processor core if they were to compete with Intel on anything like a level playing field.

In April 2003, AMD shipped their new-generation processor, code-named K8 or Sledgehammer, officially named Opteron, and ironically dubbed “Lateron” by pundits because of the repeated and lengthy delays AMD suffered in bringing this processor to market. (Nor is AMD alone in having evil nicknames applied to its processors. Some wags called the original Itanium 1 the “Itanic” because, like its namesake, it sank without a trace.)

AMD will produce two processor lines based on the K8 core. The Opteron is intended ...