AMD Unleashes Next-Gen Opteron Chips

AMD announced its new Rev F generation of Opteron server processors on Tuesday in the US, the next volley in a competition with Intel’s newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD’s new Socket F. Although that new socket disrupts server designers’ easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade