More 64 for Linux

Hot on the heels of Advanced Micro Devices’ launch last week of its Opteron 64-bit processor (also know as the AMD64), several Linux vendors promptly threw their hat into the AMD ring.

Leading off was SuSE, which announced that its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 is compatible with the AMD64 platform. As with its release for Intel’s Itanium 2 processor several weeks ago, the German Linux company is touting the AMD64-based server as a platform for compute-intensive database servers and engineering applications, as well as high-performance Linux clusters for scientific research.

On the hardware side, Penguin Computing, a server company which specializes in Linux-optimized hardware, announced its Altus 1000E server. The box is a 1.75-inch rack-mountable server with dual AMD64 processors, and can be shipped with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server pre-installed. The server can support 16G bytes of memory, and can have up to 400G bytes of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) storage. (The system can also be shipped without a hard disk, either for adding IDE storage later, or for deploying as a diskless Linux appliance).

For applications to take advantage of 64-bit processing, Cadence Design Systems announced that it has ported its Design for Test (DFT) software suite for Linux on the AMD64 processor. DFT is a hardware chip design and benchmarking application, and was used in the development of the Opteron chip.