Quad-Core System Reviewed: Two AMD Opteron 275 in Tandem

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 06/10/2005 | 02:49 PM ]

GamePC has taken a look at AMD Opteron 275 processor, which is the top-of-the-range server dual-core chip from Advanced Micro Devices aimed at 2-way servers or workstations. The microprocessor is clocked at 2.20GHz, equipped withn 128KB of L1 and 1MB of L2 cache and is connected to the rest of the system using 1GHz HyperTransport bus.

“Windows XP/Server 2003 and Linux can handle quad core systems properly, and will manage single-threaded applications over all four cores, leading to smoother performance. One of the most impressive aspects of my quad-core testing was when I ran three simultaneous mp3 encoding sessions along with an MPEG to WMV video conversion, while at the same time browsing the web through multiple windows. The massive amount of encoding going around in the background didn’t slow down web browsing at all, and it felt just as snappy as if the web browser was the only process running on the system,” writes GamePC web-site.

The top dual-core Opteron microprocessor boasts such features as SSE3 instructions as well as AMD’s PowerNow! technology aimed at reducing power consumption and heat dispassion parameters.

“Many have trained themselves after so many years that once you start up a CPU intensive application, you typically wait until it’s done or use the system lightly in order to not consume up too much CPU power. With a quad-core Opteron system, you simply don’t have to make that type of choice. With this much CPU power under the hood, you multi-task with no slowdowns, even with dozens upon dozens of Windows open,” adds the author.

• GamePC: K8 Times Two AMD’s Opteron 275 Dual-Core Processor.