AMD to the future
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, AMD, virtualisation, Processors, Futures, Enterprise, Hardware on
Last week saw the 6th birthday of AMD’s Opteron CPU, the core of its server product line. We were among a small group of journalists and analysts at AMD’s Sunnyvale campus for the event - which also included the launch of a new generation of silicon, and the unveiling of AMD’s Opteron roadmap for the next few years.
Pointing out that “the server market is very different”, AMD’s Nigel Dessau opened the even with a look at the way the server market has been changing over the last few years - with a move to throughput rather than clock speed with multicore systems, to virtualisation, and to designing for energy efficiency, all with the aim of changing the economics of the data centre. The result has been increaded server density and utilisation - more bang for your buck in less space!
So what happens next? Dessau suggests that “The way you assemble architectures is what makes the difference.” That’s why AMD puts so much into its CPUs, with much of what we’d normally consider to be the supporting chipset - including memory controllers - on the same silicon. It’s not quite a system on a chip, but it’s getting very close these days.
Pat Patla, the GM and VP of AMD’s Server Business Unit unveiled the new hardware. This was the roll out of the Istanbul product range, a six-core processor for existing two, four and eight socket systems with what he said was “30% more performance than the previous generation at the same power”. Istanbul also brings all of AMD’s power management technologies into one place as AMD-P.
Istanbul isn’t the end of the story - the next chapter is already being written in. AMD is already sampling its next generation processor, the 12-core “Magny-Cours”, which despite being a terrible pun, is a rather zippy piece of silicon - we watched a 48 core demo system much its way through several benchmarks. It’s not that far away, either, and should ship in 2010.
Virtualisation is a target market for the next generation of silicon, and it will add support for virtualised I/O. With I/O devices virtualised there’s a lot of scope for new application and new ways of working (as well as a chance to virtualise applications and servers that previously were locked into existing hardware). It’s all part of the Infrastructure 2.0 model, where management tools take advantage of hardware to deliver flexible self-managed virtualised data centres.
The other part of the AMD story is how it’s working on power management, with products available in different thermal bands - including a low power range intended for single and dual socket high density applications, ideal for cloud data centres. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially as all the features of the high end, high power CPUs are in the energy efficient versions. Dense deployments need greater efficiencies, as data centre costs are a huge proportion of the costs incurred in running a cloud service. With an average power of 40W, the EE series processors will help keep those cooling and power costs down.
Magny-Cours is only part of the AMD roadmap, and the company’s current architecture is a long term play (which is good for virtualisation, as it will allow asymmetric migrations, letting businesses use older hardware for disaster recovery purposes). The next generation will be 32nm devices in 2011, a 12 to 16 core device codenamed Interlagos and a 6 to 8 core device codenamed Valencia.
–Simon
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