amd opteron status re. gmp

[Walter Stephan]

Hi,

I've checked the archives and saw a thread in April where the then brand new 
Opteron was suggested as a possibly very interesting cpu for gmp-intensive
applications.  I didn't find much in the way of discussion later on though.

I'm currently considering purchasing a dual opteron system to run either linux 
or one of the BSD's to use as a compute server, mainly for applications which 
are a mix of ordinary floating point as well as arbitrary precision ints 
(with the integer gmp ops currently being the bottleneck running on an 
Athlon).

My question directed to those of you who already have opterons is what is your 
experience so far, and in particular how does it compare to an Athon XP?
Also, does anyone have any idea of a possible timeline for specialized opteron 
support in gmp?  Even if it currently only gives performance equal to the 
Athlon, if I can count on a significant speedup in a few month's time that 
could strongly sway me to go for the opteron.

Thanks for any help.
Walter