The Return of The Co-Processor
The Register features a company called DRC Computers that has created a co-processor for the AMD Opteron that could potentially boost its capabilities.
The tiny DRC works out of a no frills Santa Clara office, producing technology that has the potential to give servers based on AMD’s Opteron chip a real edge over competing Xeon-based boxes. DRC has developed a type of reprogrammable co-processor that can slot straight into Opteron sockets …
“DRC’s flagship product is the DRC Coprocessor Module that plugs directly into an open processor socket in a multi-way Opteron system,” the company notes on its web site. “This provides direct access to DDR memory and any adjacent Opteron processor at full Hypertransport bandwidth [12.8 GBps] and ±75 nanosecond latency”.
After Intel got rid of the 8087 math co-processors, these were not really part of any computer stores’ offerings for quite some time. The microprocessor manufacturers probably found it more efficient and profitable to bundle the math co-processor into the main processor. That left accelerators and co-processors to specialist hardware vendors at ridiculously high prices. Now DRC is coming up with this new co-processor that does not provide a missing functionality (unlike math co-processors). Instead, it boosts current processor performance at a price level good for consumers.
