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Identical to my other AMD Opteron 1.6GHz in terms of OPN (Ordering Part Number). However, the laser-engraved printing on the CPU's is different. This particular CPU doesn't have the regular production-style printing on it.

It's a B0-stepping of the Barcelona CPU so it is plagued by the TLB-bug. I have not encountered this bug in my benchmarks because the bug only shows up in specific workloads. Also my motherboard may have a newer BIOS that addresses the issue but I haven't checked on that.

As the benchmarks turn out tis CPU is not very fast. It works as a quad-core and scales in properly, but it's base clock frequency is just too low which hurts performance. Regular Barcelona-based Opterons shipped with clockfrequencies between 1.9GHz and 2.5GHz. This 1.6GHz engineering sample never found it's light of day in the form of a production sample.

I guessed the production date to be 0730 depending on the U71W300 and because my other sample is dated 0721. > Read more

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The fastest Opteron in the 8300-series with a Barcelona core. They range from 1.9GHz up to this 2.5GHz version. The initial release of AMD's Barcelona chip was in August of 2007. The 2.5GHz version appeared on April 9th, 2008.

AMD tried to create one monolithic chip with Barcelona. This means that 4-cores are integrated into one 'die' ("chip" . This proved to be a difficult job at the time. AMD's Barcelona chip got delayed and was plagued by the TLB-bug. Performance wasn't at the level Intel had so AMD struggled to keep up at this point in time.

All in all the Barcelona runs stable (with TLB-bug patched of course) but just a tad too slow and a tad too hot. > Read more

Just like this Opteron Engineering Sample but clocked 200MHz faster. > Read more

Known as the 'Third Generation' Opteron. It is the first quad-core Opteron that is based on AMD's first quad-core design 'Barcelona' (also known as K10-architecture).

Unfortunately AMD had problems getting the Barcelona to the market. It didn't deliver the performance that was needed to compete with Intel and it turned out that the Opteron was plagued by a bug in the translation lookaside buffer (B2-stepping and older). The bug was fixed/avoided with a BIOS patch but at the cost of performance. Later B3-revisions didn't have the bug.

AMD started shipping K10 Opteron's in September 2007. This particular sample is from the 21th week of 2007 which is late May 2007. > Read more

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