Dual-core Opteron's physical attributes
Built using AMD's 90nm process technology in their fabs in Dresden, dual-core Opteron's ~200 million transistors fit into the same die area as a single 130nm Opteron or Athlon FX does today. That has a thermal impact, with AMD using strained Silicon (where the Silicon lattice is stretched by around 1% by binding it to another lattice, usually Germanium) and Silicon-on-insulator (where the Silicon is placed on an insulator bed to prevent current leak and help the transistor switch faster) for its 90nm process, which helps an equivalent 90nm processor have a better set of thermal properties than a 130nm-built counterpart CPU at the same clock frequency and with the same cache sizes.The x75 Opteron series processors, if they begin with a processor ID of OSA, have a TDP of around 100W. For a pair of 2.2GHz cores each with a large 1MiB L2 cache, that's quite the achievement. Two cores do not mean a massive heat output for any thermal solution to deal with, with the x75 Opteron 'OSA' processors having the same maximum output as a 2.6GHz Athlon FX-55, pretty much. That means current thermal solutions can be used to remove the CPU's heat. Indeed, AMD have overengineered the PIB cooler for recent single-core Opterons with the dual-core versions in mind, so that one set of recent PIB coolers will do for both CPUs.
Drop in replacement?
While Intel are pulling the trick of tying new core logic to the new Pentium D and dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition processors, to force the user that wants it from them into a hydra-like purchase of at least processor and mainboard - which people already invested in recent released Pentium 4 core logic will love - AMD have said that they require only a BIOS upgrade for any existing Socket 940 mainboard for it to support a dual-core Opteron processor.That's almost true. There are electrical compatibility reasons to consider, too. Only if a board can run single-core Opterons at at least 2.4GHz will it have the circuitry necessary to support a dual-core Opteron. While that's probably 100% of released Socket 940 mainboards, it's worth mentioning. As always, contact your mainboard vendor for absolute confirmation at the same time you ask them for the BIOS to support one.
SSE3
Being a Socket 940 processor, its basic feature set outside of being a dual-core CPU is almost identical to that of the Socket 940 processors that precede it. That means a dual-channel memory controller, support for the x86-64 instruction set architecture (ISA) pioneered by Opteron nearly two years ago and class-leading clock-for-clock performance to put Intel's gigahertz-craving opposition to shame.However, just duplicating the entire front-end and execution resources of a current Opteron processor aren't what the dual-core variants are all about. Being produced as it is in AMD's 90nm fabs in Dresden, Germany, and having the latest stepping of the basic Opteron/Athlon 64 core, that means support for Intel's SSE3 instruction set first given to the world with their Prescott-1M core Pentium 4.
SSE3 is a set of mostly SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions that help a certain class of programming tasks execute in less cycles with the processor. SIMD processing is somewhat parallel, operating as it does on multiple chunks of data with the same instruction, outputting multiple bits of data at the end. Those paying attention in CPU class will have realised that a couple of SSE3's instructions are related to HyperThreading.
Summary
A dual-core x75 model Opteron has a thermal design power of around 100W, will drop right in to existing mainboards after a BIOS update, supports SSE3 and HyperThreading technologies created by Intel, and implements in full the x86-64 instruction set architecture that enables 64-bit x86 computing, recently made famous by Microsoft's announcement that the first 64-bit version of Windows XP Professional is finished. Of course, 64-bit Windows Server and many Linux variants have been treading a 64-bit path for quite some time.Let's have a quick look at the processors and the system they were housed in for benchmarking, before I have a look at performance.
