AMD’s 16-core Opteron Chips Arrive After Wait

After a abbreviated delay and more than a year of yack, Advanced Little Devices on Monday declared the availability of its prototypal 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today.

The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-called Interlagos, are 25 percent to 30 percent faster than their predecessors, the 12-Congress of Racial Equality Opteron 6100 chips, said John Fruehe, director of mathematical product marketing at AMD.

The chips are shipping at once and will be available in servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cray and Acer in the coming weeks, Fruehe said. The processors are founded along AMD's new chip intent known as Bulldozer, which provides bandwidth and performance improvements while preservation on power.

The chip shipments were delayed by a fewer weeks, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Explore. The delay came A AMD tries to reverse its sagging fortunes in the server market after losing ground over the past year to Intel. AMD's worldwide server market partake was only 5.5 percent during the second gear quarter this year, patc Intel held a 94.5 percent share, according to IDC. AMD has also been dealing with customer complaints about the company non meeting product road maps.

The five 6200 chips — 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE — run at time speeds betwixt 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz, and are priced 'tween US$523 and $1,019. The chips draw between 85 watts and 140 Isaac Watts of power and will plug into existing waiter sockets to replace older 12-core chips.

"The 6200 is targeted at really ascendible applications, things that have a lot of threads," such American Samoa databases, cloud and superior computing, Fruehe aforesaid.

The processors are for to a great extent threaded and virtualized server environments, Fruehe aforesaid. Linux and Microsoft's Windows Host 2008 operating systems are tuned to capitalize of 16 cores, and more instances of practical machines tail end be created to handle transactions, Fruehe said.

The Dozer architecture mixes the CPU with whole number units and a shared floating point unit sol more trading operations can be dead per time cycle spell drawing lower power. Other chip improvements admit Turbo Core technology, which toilet increase clock swiftness by equal to 500MHz across all cores and up to 1GHz on some cores depending on the performance required.

AMD in recent months restructured its management, and new CEO Rory Read has said a top priority is to boost the high-margin commercialised business. Scan granted that customers complained roughly AMD's inability to deliver products on time, and one of his top priorities was to fixture bit manufacturing, shipment and delivery issues.

The Opteron 6200 is an important product in AMD's host touring mapping as it's an anchor product, Atomic number 8 Research's McCarron same. "It's partially of them getting ray-proven. They had seen quite a bit of erosion in share ended the inalterable twelvemonth or and then," he said.

AMD has had some critical wins with the chip, McCarron said. One of them is at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak tree Ridge National Lab, where a supercomputer named Titan is being built with AMD's 16-core processors and Nvidia's graphics processors to deliver up to 20 petaflops of peak carrying out. The supercomputer will outpace Japan's K, which at 8 petaflops was the world's fastest figurer in the leaning of the world's quickest supercomputers issued by Top500.org in June.

Opteron's launch comes up of Intel's Xeon E5 waiter processors, which are already in yield and expected to reach servers in the beginning uncomplete incoming year. Intel has just about 400 design wins for Xeon E5, said Kirk Skaugen, frailty chairman and gross manager of Intel's Data Center Group, at a technology league originally this workweek.

AMD also announced the handiness of Opteron 4200 chips, which will go with 'tween six and eight cores. The chips operate at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 3.0GHz, and are priced between $125 and $377.

The 4200 processors are for dense server environments with low-power consumption, Fruehe aforementioned. The chips draw between 35 watts and 95 Watts of power, and arsenic underslung as 4.3 Watts per core, Fruehe said.

There is a growing interest in low-world power ARM processors as waiter makers deliver systems that can help companies dilute electric bills. But Fruehe said AMD's processors have a leg astir over ARM processors, which lack host features alike larger memory addressability and 64-bit capabilities.

"When you look at some of the things like ARM, good engineering science, only when you look at the server markets and the needs … they are truly only when hitting a small part of the market way down at the bottom where some of these things put on't affair," Fruehe said.

High-high-powered server chips will be requisite for back-last servers running data-intensifier applications or rendering images delivered through the swarm, Fruehe said.

"There's no way that a 1.4GHz ARM processor is going to make up fit to perform at the similar level as an x86 CPU," Fruehe said.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478217/amds_16core_opteron_chips_arrive_after_wait.html

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