by Anton Shilov
11/14/2011 | 10:18 PM
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday officially began to ship its highly-anticipated multi-core AMD Opteron microprocessors code-named Interlagos and Valencia with eight, twelve or sixteen x86 cores. The new chips will power various classes of servers and AMD hopes to regain market share thanks to unique capabilities of its Bulldozer micro-architecture.
"The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over. Leading OEMs are now offering cloud, enterprise and HPC customers a full suite of solutions based on the industry’s most comprehensive server processor portfolio, the new AMD Opteron family of processors which deliver an inspired balance of performance, scalability and efficiency," said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager of commercial business unit at AMD
Systems powered by various AMD Opteron 4200-series and 6200-series microprocessors from Acer, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and many additional channel and motherboard partners are expected on the market in the coming days and weeks. Up to now, AMD only supplied certain models of Opteron 6200-series to Cray, which had contracts to upgrade supercomputers with the new chips.
AMD Opteron 4200- and 6200-series microprocessors are based on Bullduzer micro-architecture. The new chips will feature up to sixteen processing engines, but since they are based on Bulldozer micro-architecture, those cores are packed into four modules. Every module has two independent integer cores (that share fetch, decode and L2 functionality) with dedicated schedulers, one "Flex FP" floating point unit with two 128-bit FMAC pipes with one FP scheduler. The chip have up to 8MB L2 cache, shared 8MB L3 cache, new dual-channel DDR3 memory controller and use HyperTransport 3.1 bus. For the first time ever, AMD's server chips support dynamic overclocking technology that can speed up the processor by up to 500MHz.
According to AMD, together, the new features of Bulldozer allow AMD's latest microprocessors to "deliver unparalleled performance, scalability and efficiency" for highly threaded workloads like HPC, database, virtualization, and especially, the emerging web and cloud market.
AMD also announced the expansion of its 2012 roadmap with the addition of the new AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform. The AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform is targeted to the ultra-dense, ultra-low power 1P web hosting/web serving and microserver markets. The first processor will be the 4-8 core CPU code-named “Zurich”, expected to ship in the first half of 2012. “Zurich” is based on the “Bulldozer” architecture and leverages the new Socket AM3+. The AMD Opteron 3000 series offering is designed for hosting customers who require dedicated servers for their customers. These cloud and web hosting customers appreciate the cost savings associated with a lower cost infrastructure, yet still want to deploy a server-class product with reliability and security features and server OS certification.