Linuxworld appears to have been witness to a demonstration of some boxes running as-yet-unannounced dual-core Opteron processors. Companies such as Cray, HP, Microway, and Sun all had dual-core Opteron based offerings, according to sources.
HP's contribution was the XW9300 mini-tower running dual Opteron 200-series chips with the ability to run dual-core chips with only a BIOS upgrade.. The motherboard is made by Tyan to an HP design. The box uses 800MHz Hypertransport through the 250 processors and 1GHz for the 252. The as-yet-unannounced dual-core chips were rumoured to be running 1GHz Hypertransport.
Microway was showing its Navion-8 4-U box. It uses dual Iwill motherboards, each holding four Opterons. Each socket is capable of using the mysterious dual-core Opterons with only a BIOS upgrade. A dual-core-populated system was on display. The box has four hot-swappable 500W PSUs, up to 64 GB DDR 400 memory, five hot-swap SCSI of SATA drives.
[Cray had a demonstration of a] XD-1 supercomputer. It, too, was based upon the dual-core Opterons. Each 3VU chassis holds 12 processors, up to 96GB memory and up to 1.5 TB disk. The memory has an aggregate bandwidth of 77 GB/sec. The chassis has a "peak performance" of 58 GFlops. and costs around $40,000.