New Choices for Retail Desktops and One-Way Servers

Its high-end processors dazzle enthusiasts and IT managers, but AMD's newest CPUs highlight price as well as performance: First, the company has introduced its most affordable Athlon 64 X2 dual-core desktop processor yet. Second, it's revised the Opteron 100 series server and workstation CPUs for compatibility with cheaper ECC unbuffered as well as registered memory.

Aimed at retail desktops to ship in time for the 2005 holiday season, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ includes two 2.0GHz, 64-bit-enabled processor cores with 512K apiece of Level 2 cache. The Socket 939 chip's OEM (1,000-unit) price is $354 -- almost $130 cheaper than the next-step-up, 2.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 4200+, while retaining all the family values of AMD64 technology for a seamless transition from 32- to 64-bit software; Enhanced Virus Protection under current versions of Windows XP, Linux, BSD Unix, and Solaris; Cool 'n' Quiet technology to reduce consumption; and an integrated 128-bit DDR memory controller plus HyperTransport bus.

Meanwhile, AMD's Opteron 100 series CPUs for one-way (uniprocessor) servers and workstations now support error-correcting-code (ECC) unbuffered DDR, letting vendors offer lower-cost solutions as well as high-end products using registered memory. The new architecture is available in the single-core Opteron models 144, 146, 148, 150, and 152 (clock speeds 1.8GHz to 2.8GHz); by late August, AMD expects to ship dual-core Opteron 165, 170, and 175 (1.8GHz to 2.2GHz) processors with ECC unbuffered memory support.