BANGALORE, INDIA: The advancements in technologies such as very large scale integration (VLSI), ultra large scale integration (ULSI) and wafer scale integration (WSI) have made it possible to integrate millions of transistors on a single chip with great precision.

The microprocessor as we know is an integrated circuit on which all the components of a computer are present on a single chip. These are capable of controlling devices ranging from microwave ovens, computers, cell phones to robotic arms of space ships and have become ubiquitous in the fields of computing, communications, manufacturing, etc.

Allowing more circuitry to be packed on each chip, processors have consistently been migrating to smaller feature sizes, resulting in becoming more efficient in terms of both performance and energy consumption.

Server class processors
Intel and AMD both have been battling it out in the enterprise consumer market of servers, blade servers and workstations with their Xeon and Opteron brand of dual processor and multi processor configurations. Designed for better performance than their desktop counterparts, these processors have more cache with better multiprocessing capabilities and have been maintained over several generations of x86, x86-64 bit processors.

AMD's Opteron
First released in April 2003 with the sledgehammer core, Opteron is the server line of x86-64 processors from AMD and were initially made on 135 nm process. Opterons had gained popularity when it comes to multiprocessor machines, where the CPUs communicated using the Direct Connect architecture over HyperTransport, a bidirectional serial/parallel high bandwidth, low latency point to point link. Transparent to the programmer, each CPU can access the main memory of another processor. The Direct Connect is the I/O architecture which is also used in AMD's Athlon X2 and Phenom processors.

In May 2005 AMD introduced their first multi-core Opteron CPUs having two separate processor cores on each die. With multicore Opterons one socket could delver the performance of two processors and two sockets could deliver of four.

The second generation Opteron processors had three categories, the 1000 series (1processor/2 cores), 2000 series (2 processors/4 cores) and the 8000 series (4 processors/8cores). Based on code named Barcelona core design, the third generation Quad core Opterons based on a 65 nm process were launched in 2007 AMD is the latest in the line server class processors. AMD claimed that the new K10 architecture based processors had better power and thermal management and incorporated a number of improvements, mainly in memory prefetching, speculative loads, SIMD execution and branch prediction yielding performance improvements over K8 architecture Opterons. Featuring their Powernow and Coolcore technologies, AMD claims that the Quad core Opterons are the most power efficient server processors they have ever produced. These processors also supported the NX bit and AMDs virtualization technology AMD-V.