[ Thanks to Augustus for this link.
]
“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…”