AMD goes to Shanghai, searching for Dragons!

Tony Austin
Monday, 17 November 2008 11:12

Opinion and Analysis

“Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD.

“In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future." "This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world’s first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago. Simply put, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right technology at the right time.” Watch the adjacent video to see and hear how AMD's global team produced the company's first 45nm chips.

One benefit of AMD's technology alliance with IBM is the development of a stable, highly-productive immersion lithography process which achieves a 40 percent gain in resolution over conventional lithography while maintaining yields consistent with conventional lithography.

AMD points out that data center managers are facing escalating pressures from the computing demands of enterprise workloads, like web serving and database applications, and the need to do more with less in the current IT spending climate.

Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, which has posted 60 percent year over year growth in the second quarter of 2008, are being rapidly deployed but require a balanced solution.

The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors further enhance AMD’s unique Direct Connect Architecture and offer a superior balanced and scalable solution to support today’s increasingly heterogeneous computing environments.

With the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor already powering nine global OEM servers specifically designed for virtualization. improvements to AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and AMD-Virtualization (AMD-V) technology, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors build on AMD’s legacy as a virtualization platform of choice.

The new processors deliver faster “world switch” time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency, and feature improved Rapid Virtualization Indexing, AMD’s innovation in AMD-V that reduces the overhead associated with software virtualization.

AMD claim that the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:

• - Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
• - A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java.
• - DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
• - Upcoming enhancements to the revolutionary AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.

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