AMD goes Torro on Torrenza open source socket

Stan Beer
Thursday, 21 September 2006 18:49

Your IT - Home IT

AMD's vision appears to be an attempt to emulate the software open source paradigm in a hardware environment by opening up the AMD architecture to third party developers.

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The vision seems to have resonated with a number of hardware vendors, who are not necessarily tied to AMD's much larger rival Intel.

IBM, Sun, Fujtsu-Siemens and supercomputer maker Cray have all thrown their weight behind the Torrenza project, realizing that socket compatible processors can be the key to improved performance, while allowing them to get a piece of the action.

AMD, which is carving out an ever increasing share of the server market can attribute much of its success to Intel, which invented the microprocesssor and then opened up its x86 architecture to third party suppliers.