corrected by AnandTech:
The first question many will have about our efforts to look at how Athlon64 will perform is how we can possibly compare an overclocked Opteron to a chip that is not overclocked. In the case of the Opteron, the comparison is more accurate than you might first think.
In normal setups (e.g. Athlon/P4), the CPU gets its clock from the FSB clock and multiplies it by the “clock multiplier” to determine how fast its internal clock should be. With a 16x multiplier, when the external clock ticks once, the CPU ticks 16 times. However, with the Athlon 64/Opteron, there is no FSB, so the CPU must get its clock from somewhere. It doesn't produce it internally; instead, it derives it from the native HT (HyperTransport) frequency, which is 200MHz, but because of the bus' nature, it runs at an effective 800MHz.
So, for our 1.8GHz Opteron 144, the multiplier is 9x, which is why raising the HT frequency to 222MHz increases the clock speed to around 2GHz. But we are increasing the HyperTransport clock in our overclocking, and not a FSB clock, which does not exist on Opteron/Athlon64. In real terms, this means our CPU overclocking has a significant impact on Performance, but it is unlikely that our increase in memory speed will have nearly as much impact on performance. Since we are nowhere near saturating the Hypertransport bus at 200 (effective 800), increasing HyperTransport to 222 (888) will not likely have much, if any, impact on overall performance. Our performance improvements, with Opteron/Athlon64, are mainly coming from increase in CPU clock — much more so than on the Pentium 4 or Athlon architectures.
Obviously, the PCI bus operates at a different frequency than the HT bus than the CPU, but they all operate based on multiples of each other, and are all derived from the HyperTransport clock.
