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2011-11-14 17:49:56


Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the second-largest maker of computer processors, will use its first new design since 2003 and low prices to try to regain market share from larger rival Intel Corp.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company will begin selling chips based on the new Interlagos design, priced between $125 and $1,019 per chip, said Patrick Patla, general manager of the server business.

AMD has priced its chips so that they will provide 55 percent more performance than Intel equivalents, Patla said. The two companies are chasing customers in the growing market for servers that run data centers at companies like Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. Some of the new AMD chips will draw as little as 5 watts per processing core, making them ideal for that market, he said.


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2011-11-14 18:07:26


AMD launches its 8-core and 16-core Opteron Bulldozer chips


After months of delays, AMD's first Bulldozer core Opterons are the 4200 and 6200 series. The 16-core Opteron 6200 series, codenamed Interlagos, has four memory channels and a top standard clock speed of 3.3GHz, with each of the 16 cores supported by 1MB of Level 2 cache. The 8-core Opteron 4200 series, codenamed Valencia, has two memory channels and the same top standard clock speed of 3.3GHz and the same 1MB of Level 2 cache per core.

Although AMD has launched a brand new architecture for the Opteron Bulldozer 4200 and 6200 chips, the firm carried over some features such as Turbo Boost and most importantly socket compatibility. So while the top-end Opteron 4200 and 6200 series chips are rated at 3.3GHz, if there is headroom in the thermal design power (TDP) draw then the frequency of all cores can be increased by up to 500MHz. A second mode, which AMD calls Max Turbo Boost, allows a 1GHz boost on half of the cores.


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2011-11-15 22:06:34


The Bulldozer Opteron is a complete makeover of the chip in an attempt to gain back what has become an eroding AMD share of the chip market.

They're real workhorses, capable of running lots of virtual machines, said Margaret Lewis, director of server software for AMD, in an interview. That makes Bulldozer a candidate for cloud service providers as well as enterprise data centers that wish to maximize workloads per virtualized host, she said. For example, a single rack full of 16-core 6200s can host 672 virtual machines, with each VM having its own core, Lewis said.

At the same time, the Bulldozer architecture represents a rearrangement of chip components on the surface of the chip die. Lewis called Bulldozer's combination of two eight-core dies a chip module. What's new is that each module represents two integer units and a single floating point unit. Under an Intel definition of cores, each core would have its own integer and a floating point unit. AMD has reshuffled the deck and announced that two cores have two integer units and a single, shared floating point unit. This makes sense since in virtualized server operations, where the floating point unit is typically used less than half the time, compared to integer operations.

Under certain circumstances, critics say this approach will hurt single-threaded performance involving floating point operations, such as in a scientific application on an individual desktop. That doesn't appear to be AMD's concern as it aims for the virtualized enterprise server and cloud data center markets.

The integer units can work faster because they share things that make sense to share
, said Lewis. That includes the Level 1 and Level 2 caches as well as the floating point unit.


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