According to the Inquirer, AMD will be releasing a limited number of Opteron chips as part of their Beachhead marketing program which seeds strategic system builders (SSBs) with Opterons prior to their launch, in a bid to increase customer demand for the Sledgehammer chip. More details are available here.
The systems very much resemble the Polywell specs we revealed earlier this week – 1U rack mounted servers, dual Opterons, up to eight GB of memory using 1GB DIMMs, and 16GB when 2GB DIMMs go into production, using 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux beta, a product version of Windows 2000, a beta version of .net server and – most importantly – the pre-alpha version of Windows AMD 64 (64-bit).
AMD will state and warn users that these will be pre-production units only but whatever it is, you can bet we will see some benchmark numbers around the net.
The systems very much resemble the Polywell specs we revealed earlier this week – 1U rack mounted servers, dual Opterons, up to eight GB of memory using 1GB DIMMs, and 16GB when 2GB DIMMs go into production, using 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux beta, a product version of Windows 2000, a beta version of .net server and – most importantly – the pre-alpha version of Windows AMD 64 (64-bit).
AMD will state and warn users that these will be pre-production units only but whatever it is, you can bet we will see some benchmark numbers around the net.