Optergone Continued

We haven’t spoken about socket 939 Opterons for a while. What’s been happening with those?

Well, let’s look at the prices as they are today, and compare them to what they were when we made the first
comparison on November 10.

Clearly the situation hasn’t improved, and in some cases have gotten rather worse. This is especially true
of Newegg, believe it or not, they are actually charging more for a 144 than they are for a 148.

Are they going to keep making them? I don’t know. Based on an admittedly incomplete survey in various forums of Opterons being purchased, we have seen up to week 46 for model 146s and week 48 for model 144s.

A few places expect to get restocked in two-three weeks, for example, this place hopes to get about a thousand 144s and 145s each in January 20, though smaller, earlier orders still haven’t shown. Monarch expects more 146s January 25. Those processors will probably have package dates towards the very end of the year.

An indication of where this might be headed can be found at this website. AMD apparently wants Opterons to be sold as server processors, and the aforementioned webpage seems to be an attempt to accommodate such wishes.

Conclusions?

It doesn’t look like the situation is going to get better. It may get worse, but it’s probably not going to get better.

If it’s ever going to get better, that will happen if these backordered processors we mentioned actually show up towards the end of January.

In the meantime, the latest processors that have shown up don’t seem to be quite as good as the ones that started the uproar. They aren’t bad, but an easy 3GHz is no longer a given.

Personally, if you haven’t bought one by now, you may want to consider waiting until CPUs containing these IBM/AMD SOI improvements come out. I’m guesstimating we’ll see a boost of a few hundred MHz from that, so 3GHz should be fairly easy with those processors.

Ed