Now, AMD as a company does have one huge - albeit very temporary - advantage here right now: all the pieces of the puzzle are in place for quite a while. Namely, a reasonably fast (but could be faster, please) CPU core in those 6-core Istanbul Opterons and their coming desktop equivalents, complemented by a very fast HyperTransport 3 low latency, high speed - up to 25.6GBps per link for version 3.1 - interconnect protocol between CPUs and I/O, as well as performance-leading GPUs in the ATI Radeon R800 family. Both the CPU core and HyperTransport are stable, proven old-timers, with stuff like FPGA accelerators and ultrafast supercomputing cluster network links already being hosted on the Opteron HyperTransport combo for years. There's even the HTX slot spec for I/O cards hitting directly into system memory.

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