AMD Announces Widespread Availability and Broad Global OEM Support for New Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor
—“Shanghai” platform delivers sweeping virtualisation performance leadership, live migration capability and up to 40 percent increase in virtualisation performance[1]—
— Enhanced 45nm design and industry’s most stable x86 server platform architecture delivers the features and efficiencies today’s data centre demands—
London, UK — 13th November 2008 —AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle.[2] With IT decision-makers looking to do more with less, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualisation performance and increased performance-per-watt. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed “Shanghai.”
“Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future. This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world’s first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago. Simply put, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right technology at the right time.”
Performance Leadership that Addresses Urgent Business Requirements Today
Data centre managers are facing escalating pressures from the computing demands of enterprise workloads, like web serving and database applications, and the need to do more with less in the current IT spending climate. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualisation, which has posted 60 percent year over year growth[3] in the second quarter of this year, are being rapidly deployed but require a balanced solution. The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors further enhance AMD’s unique Direct Connect Architecture and offer a superior balanced and scalable solution to support today’s increasingly heterogeneous computing environments.
Unsurpassed Virtualisation Performance
Through improvements to AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and innovative AMD-Virtualisation™ (AMD-V™) technology, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors build on AMD’s legacy as the virtualisation platform of choice, with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor already powering nine global OEM servers specifically designed for virtualisation. The new processors deliver faster “world switch” time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency, and feature improved Rapid Virtualisation Indexing, AMD’s innovation in AMD-V that reduces the overhead associated with software virtualisation.
Unparalleled Price/Performance
The enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:
· Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
· A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualisation, database, and Java.
· DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
· Upcoming enhancements to the revolutionary AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.
Unequaled Energy-Efficiency
Already offering industry-leading x86 server processor performance-per-watt, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors draw up to 35 percent less power at idle compared to the previous generation while delivering up to 35 percent more performance, and feature a number of new power-saving technologies. AMD Smart Fetch technology can help reduce power consumption by allowing cores to enter a “halt” state during processing idle times with zero impact on application performance and compliments AMD CoolCore™ technology, which reduces power to unused sections of each processor to further reduce power consumption.
In similarly configured platforms, the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron 75W processor-based platform offers up to a 30 percent performance to power ratio advantage over the 50W processor-based competitive platform. For these platforms, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform only used 138W at Active Idle compared to the Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform using 179W at
Active Idle. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform had a SPECpower_ssj™2008 overall 761 ssj_ops/Watt, (308,089 ssj_ops @ 100% target load). The Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform had a SPECpower_ssj™2008 result of 561 overall ssj_ops/Watt (267,804 ssj_ops @ 100% target load).[4]
Unmatched Platform Stability
45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors continue AMD’s leadership as the only x86 server microprocessor manufacturer to serve 2P to 8P servers with a single architecture, while maintaining socket and thermal compatibility with the previous generation of Quad-Core and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. This helps customers reduce platform management complexity and costs and increase data center uptime and productivity. These new processors fit into the existing Socket 1207 architecture and are also planned for use in the upcoming "Istanbul" processor, the next generation of AMD Opteron processors.
Global OEM Support
Due in part to the AMD Opteron processor's status as the industry’s most manageable and consistent x86 server platform, global OEM and system-builder partners enjoyed a rapid validation process and are expected to begin shipping their next-generation systems powered by the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor this month. The number of available enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems is expected to grow rapidly throughout this quarter and the first quarter of 2009.
“Customers can drive down costs through new “Shanghai”-based HP ProLiant servers that set new levels of power efficiency and performance,” said Paul Gottsegen, vice president, marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “HP has experienced unparalleled success over the past four years working with AMD in bringing AMD Opteron processor-based platforms to customers of all sizes. Early results indicate “Shanghai” is a winner.”
"Sun's innovative systems design together with Solaris and the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor creates an incredibly powerful, scalable, energy efficient x64 platform for virtualisation and consolidation," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's servers based on the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can handle the most complex data sets and scale as the data center grows, and with generation-to-generation platform continuity, customers can be confident the new systems will fit seamlessly into existing AMD Opteron deployments."
“Dell and AMD have a shared commitment to providing businesses with a full line-up of powerful products that simplify and lower the cost of managing IT environments,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell’s Business Product Group. “Our PowerEdge servers are specifically designed to take advantage of the virtualisation features AMD has built into its chips. That close collaboration has paid off with record breaking virtualisation performance for all 2 and 4 socket rack and blade PowerEdge servers.”
“Since 2003, IBM has leveraged the capabilities of AMD Opteron processors and Direct Connect Architecture to help satisfy compute-intensive demands of customers across the enterprise and provide them choice,” said Alex Yost, vice president of IBM BladeCenter. “IBM is building innovation on top of the energy efficiency and virtualisation performance of the new processor to deliver exceptional value to our customers.”
“The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor does not only help our customers to protect IT investments and simplify their IT management, it also empowers them to grow, adapt and scale as their business demands evolve,” said Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President Enterprise Sever Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “Our AMD based PRIMERGY server models are a perfect choice for today’s datacentre requirements. Combined with increased performance-per-watt capabilities of the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors we enable our customers to successfully address today’s challenging IT environment.”
Europe’s second largest webhost has successfully deployed highly efficient AMD Opteron processors in virtual and dedicated servers. “We have chosen these processors since they perform well while using little energy“, says Julien Ardisson, CTO of STRATO Rechenzentrum AG. “We’ll have no trouble switching to the new server generation. Energy intake as well as cooling requirements will remain more or less the same.“
Availability
The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors at the 75-watt ACP ranging from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz are available immediately, with enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors planned to follow in Q1 2009.
Upcoming 45nm Desktop Processors
AMD also plans to bring this higher-performance and more energy efficient 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in Q1 2009
with the AMD platform codenamed “Dragon.” This platform will be the second generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first generation AMD “Spider” platform released in 2008. The AMD “Dragon” platform is designed to harness the power of fusion by optimising the performance of new 45nm AMD Phenom™ II X4 quad-core processors with award-winning AMD 700 Series chipsets and award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series graphics.
Visit AMD on the Web
For more information on the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor including FAQs, development tools, online press kits and other general information, please visit
multicore.amd.com. Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at
www.amd.com/pricing.
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit
www.amd.com.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, AMD Phenom, AMD Virtualization, AMD-V, CoolCore, ATI, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
SPEC and the benchmark names SPECpower_ssj, SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp, and SPECjbb are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
[1] Based on comparison of Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed "Shanghai" vs. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed "Barcelona" on the VMmark virtualization benchmark. For details and system configuration see
www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html.
[2] Compared to Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed "Barcelona." Benchmarks published on amd.com as of November 13, 2008, show the following performance gains compared to systems based on “Barcelona”: SPECint®_rate2006: 32%; SPECfp®_rate2006: 32%; SPECjbb®2005: 64%. See
www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8796_8800,00.html. For the latest results, see
www.spec.org.
[3] Information based on IDC’s worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker for virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008.
www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21473108
[4] Based on results published on
www.spec.org as of November 05, 2008. For the latest SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark results, visit
www.spec.org/power_ssj2008.
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