I was also wondering whats the difference in athlon64 and opteron... both are 64 bit. Hopefully both support same instruction set. I bet l2 cache sizes are different.. but is there any other diffference? is the microarchitecture different? Is there any difference multi-processor wise? Thanx Spundun
Opteron is meant for server use. The Opteron 1xx series are basically the same thing as a regular Athlon 64/FX chip. The Opteron 2xx and 8xx chips are SMP capable for 2 and 4-way processor setups, respectively. The cache sizes do come into play, but some Opterons have 512KB L2 cache and others have 1MB. Same with the Athlons.
