AMD B3-Stepping Opterons, Helping Pirates?

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, February 06, 2008, 01:00 PM EDT

According to a forum post at the IsoHunt website, the good folks at AMD were nice enough to hook up the admins with a pair of pre-production B3-stepping Opteron 2352 processors, what appear to be the first processors of their type to be "out in the wild". AMD's B3 stepping is supposed to fix the TLB errata affecting current quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors. But what's more interesting is that IsoHunt - a site that facilitates piracy - apparently got the processors directly from AMD to power their servers.

"I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs. These cpus have been installed in our primary database server (as of this afternoon) and we'll definitely be following up in the near future with our impressions of these particular cpus. (Although I'll admit that we ran all of our web traffic for about 20 minutes earlier today on those cpus without any issue, so they're certainly powerhouses)."

DailyTech followed up with AMD and was told the processors, if they are actually B3 silicon, did not come from AMD regardless of what the IsoHunt forum post says. Hopefully more details will emerge in the coming days. If this turns out to be true (which I doubt), it would be interesting to hear the rationale behind the decision to seed known supporters of piracy with cutting edge technology.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, pirate, ping, help, rates, pirates, B3, Pi, PIN, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com