The Register has a look at a start-up company who's manufacturing programmable co-processors designed to work alongside AMD's Opterons. These specialized chips simply drop into the second socket 940, & communicates with the Opteron over the huge bandwidth that the Hypertransport bus supplies.

"The notion of offloading certain routines to an FPGA should prove attractive to a wide variety of industries, stretching from the oil and gas sector to high performance computing buffs and possibly even mainstream server customers."