AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs On Linux

For our testing we received four Opteron 2384 processors from AMD. In this article we are just looking at the performance of AMD's Shanghai in one and two processor configurations, but later this month when we begin testing Tyan's new Thunder n6650EX (S4992) motherboard we'll be publishing an article when benchmarks from the 16-core configuration.

The Shanghai processors are generally compatible with all existing Socket F motherboards from their second-generation platform. For our testing we had used the Tyan Thunder n3600M and all that was required for Shanghai support was upgrading the BIOS (v2.03).

The Tyan Thunder n3600M supports up to two AMD Socket F CPUs and there are eight DDR2 memory slots per socket. The motherboard can handle up to 64GB of Registered DDR2 memory up to 667MHz speeds. For connectivity this motherboard has six Serial ATA 2.0 ports and eight SAS ports. There are two PCI Express x16 slots on the Thunder n3600M but each of them is limited to a PCI-E x8 signal. For those not interested in the PCI Express slot for discrete graphics, the n3600M has an ATI ES1000 integrated graphics controller. The chipset used by this workstation-oriented motherboard is a NVIDIA nForce Pro 3600.