Opteron

Opteron is AMD’s line of x86-64 server and workstation processors. Introduced in 2003, Opteron CPUs were among the first to deliver native 64-bit computing on x86 and helped establish the AMD64 instruction set in enterprise systems. The Opteron family spans several generations aimed at multiprocessor servers, data centers, and high-performance computing.

Technically, Opteron processors typically integrate an on-die memory controller, multi-core designs, and ECC memory support, with HyperTransport-based interconnects to enable fast communication in multi-socket configurations. They provide hardware-assisted virtualization (AMD-V) and maintain 32-bit compatibility modes for legacy software. The family evolved through multiple microarchitectures and process nodes, delivering improvements in core counts, performance per watt, and memory bandwidth.

In the market, Opteron competed with Intel Xeon processors and became a standard choice for databases, virtualization hosts, HPC clusters, and other enterprise workloads requiring reliability and scalability. AMD’s strategy in the late 2010s led to the introduction of the EPYC brand, based on newer architectures, which gradually supplanted Opteron for new server deployments. The Opteron name remained in use for existing systems and certain embedded applications for a time, reflecting its historical role in expanding 64-bit computing in servers.