Advanced Micro Devices today reassured X-bit labs its recently released AMD Opteron processors with 1000MHz HyperTransport bus were compatible with the infrastructure originally intended for the chips with 800MHz HT interconnection.

“New AMD Opteron processors are to be compatible with existing platforms. As long as the [main]board has a BIOS that supports the new revision of the Opteron, there should be no issue with a 1GHz HT enabled CPU in a motherboard with a chipset that supports an 800MHz HT spec,” AMD’s spokesperson Damon Muzny told X-bit labs.

“HyperTransport is designed to communicate at the highest common data transfer rate, which in this scenario, would be 800MHz because of the motherboard’s spec,” Mr. Muzny added.

The new AMD Opteron processor 152, 252 and 852 intended for 1-way, 2-way and 4/8-way workstations/servers respectively are clocked at 2.60GHz, incorporate dual-channel PC3200 memory controller, 1MB of cache and SSE3 technology, something that only Intel Corp.’s chips have sported so far. The chips are designed for Socket 940 infrastructure, but have a little bit higher thermal design power than typical Opteron chips: instead of 89W, the models 152, 252 and 852 have TDP of 92.6W.

Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices also has numerous chips with the same E4 core produced using 90nm SOI technology for various 1P, DP and MP applications in its lineup. The chips also feature SSE3 as well as 1000MHz HT bus. All such chips clocked from 1.60GHz to 2.40GHz have thermal design power of 85.3W. AMD also sells Opteron chips with 2.0 – 2.20GHz clock-speed based on D4 stepping with TDP of 67W.

Potentially, 1.0GHz HyperTransport bus can speed up transfer rate between CPUs working in 2P, 4P, 8P, etc applications as well as between CPUs and I/O controllers of the systems. For server environments the only core-logic that sports 1.0GHz HT bus validated by AMD is NVIDIA’s nForce Professional-series.