AMD launched the Opteron today. I found Ace’s Hardware’s review (stupendous server performance coverage) and AMDZone’s review (regular workstation numbers) the most informative.
Based on the Ace’s reviews, it looks like the Opteron blows away the competition on Linux. Check out the MySQL performance on that sucker.
FiringSquad also has a great interview with Tim Sweeney on the impact of 64-bits on gaming:
In Unreal Tournament 2003, we built 2000-polygon meshes, texture map them, and use them in-game with diffuse lighting. That was a simple process, which didn’t require any memory beyond that taken up by the mesh and texture maps.
In our next-generation technology, we are building 2,000,000-polygon meshes, and running them through a preprocessing program that analyzes the geometry and self-shadowing potential of the mesh based on thousands of incident lighting direction using per-pixel floating point math, and compresses all of this data down to texture maps, bump maps, and 16-component spherical harmonic maps at as high a resolution as possible.
This process uses many gigabytes of memory, and implementing it on 32-bit CPU’s places a lot of constraints on the size of meshes we can preprocess and the resolution of maps we can generate. With onerous programmer gymnastics, this kind of algorithm could be made disk-based or Address Windowing Extensions aware, but these approaches require an order of magnitude more development effort, and aren’t practical given the frequency with which we change and improve our algorithms.