Thursday 29 July 2010
AMD is targeting cloud computing and web serving environments with its new HE Opterons. The SE Opterons sacrifice power savings for additional performance. AMD plans to release additional models with even greater power savings by the end of this year. AMD’s focus with the SE parts is Intel’s Nehalem server chips. It appears with this thermal envelope and performance data (assuming AMD’s numbers can be trusted), that AMD has some performance/power advantage in the 4P 24-core space. However, for other products they fall in the middle of Intel’s offerings. In addition, Intel’s chips are less expensive at about $225 to $375, depending on model.
The current variety of AMD CPUs are proving to be quite extraordinary, though AMD is not really able to price them to compete. After a long bit of suffering with the transition from 65nm to 45nm, AMD really seems to have nailed every problem and is manufacturing very capable chips. Though we don’t know yet about yields, these powerful CPUs with low voltages and high efficiency indicate it could be quite mature, though the per-unit prices seem a little high.
Since their initial introduction of multi-core processors for the server market, AMD wanted to help IT managers reduce datacenter energy costs without compromising performance. These processors are specifically designed to address rising demand for balanced systems with increased performance yet greater power-efficiency for cloud computing and web serving environments. They are the highest performance-per-watt processors that AMD has ever brought to market. This feature will help drive down power consumption while addressing the shifting cloud and Web landscape of today’s datacenter.
The new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are well suited for Web serving and cloud computing workloads and are available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P technology features and advanced I/O capabilities as the standard power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors. These new processors also offer up to 18 percent lower platform-level power consumption over the standard wattage version. Additionally they deliver up to 18 percent better performance-per-watt compared to the quad-core version.
