opteron ?

James Ralston qralston+ml.rhl-beta at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon Jul 21 22:28:22 UTC 2003


On 2003-07-21 at 12:52:51-0700 Christopher McCrory <chrismcc at pricegrabber.com> wrote:

> Are there plans to do an opteron release?

I asked about this at one of the webcasts.

The next version of RHEL will most likely support the Opteron.  (The
public beta should be appearing Real Soon Now.)

It doesn't really make sense to take the effort to put AMD64 support
in Cambridge, for two reasons:

    1.  The Opteron is AMD's server chip, and is thus best paired with
        RHEL.

    2.  The Athlon 64 (the desktop version of the Opteron) isn't
        slated for release until the end of September, which is long
        after the StopShip date for Cambridge.

If the Athlon 64 succeeds in the marketplace, I'd expect to see Athlon
64 support in Cambridge++.

(It would be a sad thing if Microsoft Windows were to natively support
the Athlon 64 before RHLP does, but alas, if the various release
schedules hold, that will probably be the case.)

> If not, is it possible to "cross compile" an opteron release from a
> x86 box?

Perhaps, but it sounds painful.

A more interesting question is whether Red Hat is keeping an eye on
AMD64, such that when the Athlon 64 is released, Cambridge will at
least run on it (albeit in 32-bit mode).

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA





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