Joe, Re: "I don't know the answer to this, but wouldn't it be possible for Opteron to support memory over 4 GB in 32-bit mode the same way Xeon addresses it?"
Right now, Athlon does not have this capability, and AMD has not announced any such support for Hammer, either. I don't see why they couldn't build it in, but then that would sort of defeat the purpose of porting things over to x86-64, at least at first. And that kind of delay would only work to Intel's advantage.
Re: "I don't think there will be any 8-way Opteron right from the start. At best 4-way, but mainly 1 and 2 way."
I am guessing that 4-way will be more difficult than AMD realizes. The amount of infrastructure you need to sell in that market is more than just stringing 4 CPUs together. Even if they can do the engineering side of it, there is that infrastructure required (and I doubt the OEMs are going to help fit the bill for that development). If I see commercial 4-way systems before the middle of next year, I would be impressed.
I do agree, though, that UP and DP servers are likely to be very popular from the whitebox makers, and if there is ever to be an OEM design win, it will be from those segments.
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