Chill out guys (all). You're on the internet and its pointless getting serious. No ones gonna harm you here, well at least not physically.... I skip over watching TV you know.

PetNorth: I'll check your numbers out after some system building I gotta do right now. Looks good at a glance.

The problem, and yes, I believe it is a problem folks, that this chip is server market. Server market, what the various chip PR teams play up, hype and fight over is what counts most: usually the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks first, power second and simultaneously, price.

In the same respect, when AMD says its Opteron 2.5GHz scales 15% better than a 2GHz, I assure you they mean for the market segment and applications its to be sold in: server. I really reckon AMD went for 2S, 4S, 8S kills with this silicon features such as HT 3.0/DCA2.0, massive bandwidth power and low TDP. Because that's where most of the profit is and day by day, even more than 4-way supercomputing and general computing power requirements are increasing in demand. In these sections, power efficiency and price is key with decent performance, believe me.

Look at the successful uptakings already: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Dell, Appro, Egenera, Gateway, Rackable Systems, Supermicro, and Verari (probably more).

Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell: his company intends to double its lineup of AMD-based systems by year's end.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO: his company is aiming to use the quad-core Opteron to double its AMD-based server business.

"The two companies said Lucasfilm would order servers based on the technology for the data centers at Lucasfilm that produce digital arts and entertainment. Lucasfilm said it uses AMD chips exclusively at its global operations at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco and its campus in Singapore. The San Francisco campus alone houses a 13,500-square-foot data center complete with a render farm, file servers, and storage systems."

I don't for a second believe AMD has clock speed binning problems when they just managed to release a very old X2 3200MHz that overclocks to 3500MHz stable, but I DO have reason to believe they have low yields on the new chips fitting those same 2xK8 type of 65nm chip upgrade (K10) into the 120W/75W TDP they would like and have touted for long being the key. That's exactly why I believe the new boards will help, and why HT 3.0 with high speeds is not being utilized on these chips now (because higher HT/IMC frequencies can be power hogs).

I really am not and cannot draw conclusions for any desktop parts based on any chip released yet. And I do think Phenom FX is a different fish to Opteron, however slightly.

The marketing team of Intel is spot on with winning fans, praise and leadership: they launch at high as frequencies as possible, and make their minimum and maximum frequencies at launch quite high with immediate effort on clock rampings back and forth (along with price ) ASAP. That's the way to qain a market share, to make a loud buzz from the initial launch performance, as that shock really does sink into and capture people for a while - generating knock on effect legacies. AMD needs to do something similar. And from what I'm seeing, they are working solid to launch higher clocks along with a good platform.

BTW, sorry about this again but that 30k 2k6 Inq, I feel pretty sure its 2x Phenom 3GHz chips there on that RD790 board (yes I know that it states of single socket)

These Opty numbers should be trusted for clock scaling at its peak for future K10 in server benches IMHO. I wouldn't count on more than this at all (not sure if the Xeon numbers are true though)->
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