Opteron is the AMD processor targeted to the server market. The first Opteron processors were based on AMD64 architecture (a.k.a. x86-64 or ???hammer???), the same one used by other CPUs from AMD, like Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Turion 64 and Sempron (socket 462 Sempron models aren??™t based on this architecture, however). Most recent Opteron processors are based on the new AMD K10 microarchitecture. In this tutorial we will present Opteron??™s main features and also several tables listing all models released to date.

The main feature of AMD64 and K10 architectures is the memory controller, which is embedded in the processor itself and not located on the chipset like all other CPUs.

Because of this architecture the communication between the CPU and the memory modules is done thru a dedicated memory bus, while the communication between the CPU and the chipset uses a separated bus, HyperTransport (click here to read our tutorial on HyperTransport).

There are two main differences between Opteron and other AMD processors.

First, some Opteron models can run in SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) mode, i.e. more than one processor installed on the motherboard, while other processors can??™t.

Opteron CPUs are identified thru a ???model number??? and the first digit from this number indicates the symmetric multiprocessing level that the processor accepts: Opteron models starting with ???1??? can??™t run in SMP mode, while models starting with ???2??? can run in a two-way SMP mode (i.e. up to two processors on the motherboard) and models starting with ???8??? can run up to an eight-way SMP mode (i.e. up to eight processors on the motherboard).

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