More Details on AMD’s X2s: The First Dual-Core Opterons!

We may as well call this AMD Day because the news is rolling in from all over the Web. When did you ever hear of of a company showing a product early because a team executed better than expected?! AMD is on Fire!! Here’s some more info from our friends at Extreme Tech:

“Advanced Micro Devices will announce its dual-core “X2″ desktop processors in an event in New York later today, months in advance of earlier predictions. The new X2 chips, priced between $537 and $1,001 in individual lots, will range in speed from between a rating of 4200+ to 4800+, with actual speeds of between 2.2- and 2.4-GHz. AMD isn’t characterizing the event as a “launch” for the new X2 parts, as the dual-core processors will be released to OEMs in time for X2 PCs to be delivered in June.

“The new X2s were complemented, as expected, by a rollout of the company’s first dual-core Opterons, which will be released in two phases: the models 865, 870, and 875 for 4-way servers and above are scheduled to be delivered immediately to OEMs, while the 265, 270, and 275 for 2-way machines will be shipped in late May, AMD said.

“AMD originally scheduled the X2 to ship in the latter half of the year. However, AMD pulled the schedule in after AMD’s manufacturing teams executed better than expected, according to Ben Williams, vice president of AMD’s commercial business.

“The new X2s will not require a new heat sink or socket, and can be used with existing motherboards. AMD will draw distinctions between the company’s “Direct Connect” architecture that ties memory controllers directly to the processor core, and Intel’s own Pentium D approach, which funnels memory requests through a single unified front-side bus, Williams said. The differing speed grades will be enabled through a combination of clock speed and cache size. The 4800+ and 4400+ processors will contain a full megabyte of level-2 cache per core, while the 4600+ and 4200+ will use 512 Kbytes of level-2 cache per core. ” Source: ExtremeTech

I think it finally happened. Intel became Mircosoft and AMD is now Google. Or something like that.