AMD Opteron

The AMD Opteron was a family of server and workstation processors launched by AMD on April 22, 2003, beginning with the SledgeHammer core on a 130-nanometer process. It was the first commercial implementation of the x86-64 (AMD64) instruction set, and was the processor that broke Intel's long-running dominance of the x86 server market. Opteron's strategic advantage was that it ran existing 32-bit x86 software natively at full speed while also offering 64-bit address space for new workloads. Server operators could upgrade hardware without rewriting or recompiling their applications, an option Intel's competing IA-64 / Itanium did not provide. Opteron also introduced AMD's HyperTransport interconnect and an on-die memory controller, giving it strong multi-socket scaling that the contemporary Xeon could not match. Successive generations expanded core counts and improved efficiency: Barcelona (2007, first native quad-core x86 server chip and AMD's K10 microarchitecture), Shanghai (2008), Istanbul (2009, six cores), Magny-Cours (2010, twelve cores via dual-die packaging), and the Bulldozer and Piledriver-based 4300 / 6300 series (2011–2012, up to sixteen cores). At its 2011 peak, Opteron powered 33 of the top 100 systems on the TOP500 supercomputer list. Production wound down in early 2017, when AMD shifted its server strategy to the new Zen-based EPYC line.