AMD Rolls Out new Piledriver CPUs

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Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes that AMD’s new Opteron 4300 and 3300 processors have “Piledrive” cores with four new instructions and a bunch of tweaks to goose the performance of the dual-core module compared to the first-generation “Bulldozers.”

For many years, AMD has been shipping four different styles of Opterons. The plain vanilla ones run at the standard voltage and have the standard thermal profiles. The Special Editions, or SEs, run hotter and clock higher and deliver the highest performance, but they are also wickedly expensive and impossible to put into dense servers. The Highly Efficient, or HEs, are a bin sort to find chips that run at significantly lower voltages with slightly lower clock speeds compared to the standard parts, and the Extremely Efficient or EE parts run are a deep bin sort to find parts that run at even lower voltages and lower clock speeds. but which have very low thermals.

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