14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's errata-free quad-core Opterons are slated for official unveiling in April this year, eight months later than the original release date. It was supposed to hit the market in September, but a translation lookaside buffer bug kept it away from the retailers' shelves. Although the company announced that the B3 stepping of the Barcelona silicon is completely functional, the processors are not available for sale yet.
The chip manufacturer has already shipped its first units to worldwide testers, and it seems that one of the first to grab the units is torrent site Isohunt, that has received "2 pre-production engineering samples" of the upcoming Opteron 2352. The chip is a 2100 MHz quad-core processor based on the Barcelona core with 2 MB of L2 cache.
"I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs. These cpus have been installed in our primary database server (as of this afternoon) and we'll definitely be following up in the near future with our impressions of these particular cpus. (Although I'll admit that we ran all of our web traffic for about 20 minutes earlier today on those cpus without any issue, so they're certainly powerhouses)," wrote one of the IsoHunt administrators in a blog post.
IsoHunt is one of the largest peer-to-peer website in the world and has been lately the target of some piracy accusations from MPAA and RIAA . It is interesting why AMD would pick such a website for testing its latest CPUs, given the fact that the website has been sued by the MPAA for copyright infringement in early 2006.
Leaving the ethics behind, the website is a great playground for testing server technology, given the fact that the site is one of the largest torrent indexing platforms, and currently counts more than 938,000 torrents from 57697 trackers.