AMD Opteron Reviewed Linux Style!

Back in April of this year (April 22, 2003), AMD finally announced their much anticipated Opteron processor which ushered
in the beginning of the affordable 64-bit computing age on mainstream servers and workstations. At that time, AMD released the Opteron 240, 242, and
244 processors for 2-way servers. From there, AMD had plans laid out to release 8-way and 1-way processors for servers over the next several months.

At time of release, no workstation motherboards for Opteron processors could be found or, at the very least, they were extremely rare. Finally, around
August, we saw the emergence of the first mass-production boards from Tyan and MSI in the form of the Thunder K8W (S2885) and K8T Master2-FAR
respectively. We finally had choices for Opteron workstations and could seriously take a look at how an AMD workstation would perform under our
favorite OS, Linux. This review takes a look at the Opteron processor and how it performs under Linux in 32-bit mode and even touches 64-bit on the
desktop. Included in this workstation review, you’ll find featured hardware from Tyan, NVIDIA, and Corsair. It’s time to see what AMD has in store for
the future and pit the Opteron against the previous workstation leader, the Intel Xeon at 3.2GHz.