Trey Gruel wrote:
I'm sure I've seen dual Athlon 64 mobo's on sale and a friend and I have discussed watching the price drops on them, it could be they didn't make a distinction between Athlon64 and Opteron, caveat emptor perhaps? -- i.e you could buy one of those boards and 2 Athlon 64 CPU's and discover you have a spare CPU you can't use.
nope. the athlon 64 uses a 764-pin connection to the motherboard while the athlon 64 fx and opteron use a 940-pin connection. pretty soon the athlon 64 fx will switch to a 939-pin so it won't require use of registered ram. those extra pins provide the second memory channel and extra hypertransport channels that philipp was talking about.
And to think that the first microprocessor (Intel 4004) used a 16 pin package!