Breaking Performance Bottlenecks of SMP Systems with Opteron By Spencer Kittelson Date: July 29, 2002One of the most wonderful performance enhancing features of the forthcoming [AMD] Opteron (Hammer) are the multiple independent direct memory channels that are built into each CPU. This is a huge, huge difference from the shared memory (actually, shared everything) approach of Intel symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems. Given the limitations of today's memory technology, this was an exceedingly smart move on the part of AMD and will likely change the way we design some of our applications in the very near future. Intel SMP systems exhibit...
