Say, you must be able to replace a memory module without reboot. Imagine how much crap you need in the memory controller to do that. All other big iron CPU's in the world have a separate memory cotroller in the northbridge, which is probably as complicated as a good cpu. Opteron doesn't have that.
You never need to hotswap memory in any server under $50K. So I see that as a pretty much the ceiling of how high Opteron can go.