Saturday, October 22, 2005

Clock-Speed Matters for Workstations - Article. AMD Opteron 254 Reviewed

1:40 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Even though both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. push multi-core processors into the market, current applications may still benefit from high-speed single-core central processing units (CPUs), which is why AMD continues to release its singl-core AMD Opteron chips that feature high clock-speed. An article at The Tech Report tries to find and explain why a pair of singe-core chips at higher frequency are at some tasks better than two dual-core processors.

“With dual-core CPUs firmly established, neither manufacturer has been talking much about single-core processors in the workstation market - but the high-end single-core processor still has a hand or two to play before it makes a final exit. AMD’s recent stealth launch of the Opteron 254 at 2.8GHz ensures that the limelight stays focused on their dual-core products, while the Opteron 254 offers an intriguing option for buyers caught on the fence between lower-speed, dual-core and higher-clocked, single-core processors,” writes The Tech Report.

The AMD Opteron 254 processor is set to function at 2.80GHz frequency, sport 1MB of L2 cache and dual-channel PC3200 memory controller. The chip is produced using 90nm process technology with silicon-on-insulator and has thermal design power of 92.6W. The CPU is compatible with Socket 940 infrastructure and theoretically can be installed into any system designed for AMD Opteron processors.

“At $851 per chip, the Opteron 254 is significantly cheaper than the Opteron 275 - and in some cases, a better value. That question turns entirely on the issue of workloads and software parallelization, but based on what we’ve seen, we can draw some general conclusions. Most of the desktop-oriented software, media encoders, and analytical scientific software we tested here is either single-threaded or dual-threaded, and shows minimal gains from adding another two cores. If you intend to focus on this type of work, you may be better served by the faster Opteron 254s,” concludes The Tech Report.

• The Tech Report: AMD’s Opteron 254 Processor.

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