AMD's Opteron 165 and 180 Processors
Even if you're not interested in AMD's Opteron 165 and 180 Processors, the Tech Report's latest article is worth reading for Scott's sense of humor and writing style alone. Not only is there a ton of information and performance data here, but you're bound to chuckle a couple of times as well.
"With the move to dual-core CPUs, though, the Opteron 100 series looks poised for success. After all, if you can get essentially two Opteron processors into a single-socket motherboard, you've got low-end server and workstation nirvana. To facilitate such things, AMD has sought to free the Opteron 100 series from prior constraints by moving some pins around on the underside of the chips. As a result, the new dual-core Opteron 100 processors will drop into a plain ol' Socket 939 motherboard and communicate happily with a pack of unbuffered DIMMs, just like an Athlon 64.
This change has most likely provoked a whole other bundle of pyschological issues--namely, an identity crisis. Take the Opteron 180, for example. With 1MB of L2 cache for each of its two CPU cores and a 2.4GHz clock frequency, the 180 looks for all the world like an Athlon 64 X2 4800+. The main difference between the two? The name, pretty much. Now, that doesn't make the Opteron 180 a bad product--far from it, in fact--but it may never escape comparisons to its Athlon 64 doppelganger."
