Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has released a quad-core variant of its Opteron processor. It says it will revolutionise the data centre, where cost, energy efficiency and spatial constraints are becoming increasingly important.
AMD COO Dirk Meyer announced the arrival in the marketplace of the "Barcelona" chip in its Spanish namesake city yesterday.
Meyer said the chip will offer "an unparalleled visual experience" and a new definition in energy savings. "As we know, IT increasingly offers enhanced media capabilities and people increasingly consume and produce media on IT solutions."
Up to now, computers requiring four cores in their processing unit had to make do with either four cores linked after manufacture or two dual-cores connected the same inefficient way.
The 65nm Barcelona chip contains over half-a-billion transistors, Meyer said. "It is amazing what technology has done. We can build 600 million transistors on a single chip and get them all to work."
Holding up a wafer on which was printed hundreds of the 65nm chips, Meyer added that it is astounding that the wafer "consists of over a 100 billion transistors".
"Sometimes we take for granted the amazing technology we have. We really should be proud, there's an entire industry behind this, from the tool vendors, designers and manufacturers to the software vendors that make this stuff work. Let's not forget the software vendors, because without them the chip isn't very interesting," Meyer said of the coalition of clients and vendors that helped AMD develop the technology.
Performance is key
AMD introduced the Opteron 64 chip as a single-core entity in 2003. In 2005, it introduced a dual-core variant and has now doubled that to four cores. But, as an engineering company, AMD some years ago already became concerned at what Meyer described as a "never-ending quest for clock speed at the expense of energy efficiency.
"Performance is key - but increasingly the ability to get performance out of a data centre is limited by the ability to get power in and get heat out. One of the key messages here is that Barcelona enables a user to increase performance by 50% to a 100% without re-plumbing the data centre, without having to rewire or install more air conditioning. So, investor protection is a key message."
Meyer said the new chip can seamlessly replace the old in terms of power consumption and thermal signature, "allowing OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to deliver competitively priced products to the market". This saves buyers money in terms of reduced transition costs and by an equal reduction in the need to validate software on the new hardware.
The AMD COO added that the Barcelona chip offers three other significant advantages. In terms of energy efficiency, he says, the user of a 500-server farm in the US can expect to cut electricity cost by just under $120 000 a year. This cut in consumption also translates into environmental terms, with 442 811kg less carbon dioxide ending up in the atmosphere.
Quad-core computing also enhances virtualisation, currently a key data centre trend. Meyer predicted a 70% increase in virtualisation performance over the Opteron dual-core at the same power level.
Performance-wise, Meyer said buyers also win. He promises a 35% performance in general and specifically a 30% performance-per-watt advantage over "the competition", meaning Intel.
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