Originally Posted by
zir_blazer
I doubt that anyone here cares about current Opterons lineup. You could have a ton of raw processing power with a pair of Magny Cours but there is not any real life scenario where you could even actually use it on a Desktop enviroment that doesn't include some Synthethic Benchmark, and you're losing no less than 500-1000 MHz (The Opteron 6180SE is the fastest, 2.5 GHz part with Magny Cours) against a Desktop part, and overclocking will be hard if not impossible considering that you will have no BIOS support to do so and must use Software tools like a Clockgen for the Base Clock limited by a very low Multiplier, and I doubt Dual Socket Motherboards deals good with high Base Clocks. With the exception that you can somehow go beyond 6 CPU intensive Threads a Thuban @ 4 GHz would be better, and much, much cheaper. Otherwise you could go for a Dual LGA1366 with a pair of Xeons E5520 or higher and have both Dual Processor, the advantage Sandy Bridge vs K10 performance and power consumption, extremely high end Single Threaded performance, and at least one expensive Motherboard that was capable of overclocking them by BIOS (An EVGA it was I think).
A good guess is that Bulldozer could launch earlier for Servers than Desktop, I suppose that we could happily annoy JF-AMD to get info from him if that happens. Besides, I DO expect that any sort of high hype or anticipation would really stall current Servers sales. On the Desktop there is always people that pays inflated prices for old Hardware in supermarket computers and the like, but anyone willing to spend over 4 or 5 digits of dollars in just Processors should do even minor research, and if there was a major launch nearby, wait for it. If Bulldozer proves to be impressive and no one wants the current Opterons, JF-AMD wiill have to use Magny Cours as cotton inside his pillow.