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30925 Rev. 3.04 February 2004
Builder’s Guide for AMD Opteron™ Processor-
Based Servers and Workstations
Chapter 5
Hardware Considerations 39
Servers are systems that are not typically used by just one operator sitting in front of a display
attached directly to the server. The server is used to support other computers such as desktops or
workstations, connected through a network. A server can be used to supply computational
processing to connected thin clients. A thin client is a keyboard and display terminal that has very
little computing power of its own, but relies on the server to which it is connected to run
applications. A server can also be used to access data stored on very large storage devices.
Therefore, a server may need to have the capability to connect to hundreds of disk drives.
Storage servers need to have an ample supply of PCI-X slots that can accept cards used for storage
access. For example, a PCI-X SCSI can have four SCSI ports on it. Each port can support up to 15
SCSI drives. Therefore, one SCSI PCI-X card can support up to 60 SCSI drives. If a server has
four PCI-X slots, it can support up to 240 SCSI drives.
5.7 AMD Opteron™ Processor Utilities and Updates
AMD CPUID—This application executes and displays the return data from the CPUID
instruction set. No source code is provided.
AMD Processor Information Display Utility—This utility displays the processor signature,
approximate speed, L1/L2 cache sizes, processor revision, and instruction extensions supported.
These utilities can be found and downloaded from
http://www.amd.com/us-
en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8796_871,00.html.
In EMEA, these utilities can be found and downloaded from
http://www.amd.com/drivers.
5.8 AMD-8000™ Series Chipset Drivers
Table 4 shows AMD-8000 series of chipset components drivers for Microsoft
®
operating systems.
Table 4. Microsoft
®
Drivers for the AMD-8000™ Series of Chipset Components
32-Bit Operating Systems
64-Bit
Operating
Systems
Drivers for Microsoft
®
Operating Systems
Windows
®
98
Windows
2000
Windows
XP Pro
Windows
Server
2003
Windows
64-Bit
Editions
for
AMD64
AMD-8151™
HyperTransport™ AGP3.0
Graphics Tunnel Driver
√ √ √ √
enabled
natively