A server company OctigaBay has uncovered some plans of Advanced Micro Devices in regards the announcement of some future microprocessors. It now appears that AMD Opteron processor at 2.40GHz will be available in “early 2004”, if OctigaBay is correct.

Vancouver, Canada-based OctigaBay Systems Corporation develops powerful systems for simulation, modeling, searching, sorting, data mining and other processing intensive applications at an affordable price. During the announcement of its upcoming OctigaBay 12K cluster, the company said it would be based on AMD Opteron Series 200 processor clocked at 2.40GHz and would be available in early 2004.

Following the existing nomenclature for AMD Opteron processors, we may expect Opteron CPU for 2P systems clocked at 2.20GHz to be branded as Opteron 248, while the Opteron CPU for 2P computers clocked at 2.40GHz to be called as Opteron 250.

The OctigaBay 12K will consist of six 2-way AMD Opteron 2.40GHz-based systems in one “shelf” and will be able to achieve amazing 58GFLOPS, according to manufacturer’s claims. Furthermore, up to 12 OctigaBay 12K shelves can be assembled in a single rack, providing 691GFLOPS of processing power. OctigaBay 12K systems scale to over 12 000 processors in “multirack” without requiring any external switches to provide up to 60TFLOPS, the company said.

Every OctigaBay 12K with 12 AMD Opteron processors inside will have up to 96GB of registered DDR memory, 4 PCI-X bus slots, dual Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X card (up to 8 GbE ports per shelf), dual Fibre Channel HBA (up to 8 Fibre Channel ports per shelf), up to 6 Serial ATA-150 drives and up to 6 laptop drives. The system will also feature loads of capabilities to improve its reliability and will run a special version of Linux operating system. More technical information is available at the company’s web-site.

It is very interesting to note AMD Opteron 2.40GHz processor’s SpecInt_base2000 and SpecFP_base2000 scores published by OctigaBay – 1440 and 1404 respectively.

In case OctigaBay claims and promises are valid, we may expect AMD to roll out Opteron processors at 2.20GHz speed either later this year, or very early next year, while the 2.40GHz Opteron chips are likely to come between January and late February.

The most important piece of information here is the planned core-speed of 2.40GHz for 0.13 micron SOI AMD 64-bit processors. In case AMD manages to supply such CPUs in mass quantities, the company will probably be in a very favourable position in the server market. Moreover, if the firm manages to launch a 2.40GHz Athlon 64 FX-53 processor well before Intel ships its Prescott products in Q1 2004, the performance crown for the desktop will be in Sunnyvale for quite a while. Earlier this week sources reported about AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 launch this year.

The OctigaBay 12K system will be featured at SuperComputing 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona, November 17 – 20, 2003 . Systems will be commercially available early in 2004.