AMD B3-Stepping Opterons, Helping Pirates?
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.
