Items tagged with Interlagos
AMD's new Piledriver-based Opterons are launching today, completing a product refresh that the company began last spring with its Trinity APUs. The new 12 & 16-core Piledriver parts are debuting as the Opteron 6300 series. Originally, AMD had planned to add still more cores with this refresh and had anticipated a line of 10 and 20-core products. The company scrapped this plan last year, stating instead that Piledriver was enough of an improvement that they saw no need to widen existing parts still further. Now that the next generation of Opteron CPUs is here, what can we expect? In SPECjbb2005, at least, significant performance gains. This graph isn't as informative as we'd like; SPECpower_ssj2008...
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Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off AMD's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of Sunnyvale's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part. Bulldozer, launched just over a year ago, was a major disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, made a number of important changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built 'Dozer in the first place. In the...
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AMD's CEO, Rory Read, has made no secret of his plans to take the company in new and different directions, but the company's server announcement today caught the market by surprise. Sunnyvale has purchased SeaMicro in a deal worth ~$330 million, the majority of which ($281M) will be paid in cash. The acquisition brings AMD's onetime CTO, Fred Weber, at least temporarily back to the fold; Weber left AMD to take a position with SeaMicro. If you aren't familiar with the company, SeaMicro is a server startup that made a name for itself starting several years ago when it built server rigs using Atom processors. The company has extended and built on that foundation since its inception and ironically...
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AMD's Financial Analyst Day last week made it clear that while the company is primarily focused on consumer products and SoC design, it still wants to be a player in the server market. The various presentations were a bit unclear as to how AMD thought it would make that happen -- there was plenty of mention of "the cloud", but few details on how AMD could position its Bulldozer / Interlagos architecture to make a play in this space. Extensive testing over at Anandtech has shed some light on the situation. The new article is a follow-up to the original story; combined, they offer a panoramic view of Sunnyvale's position in a wide range of HPC, virtualization, rendering, SQL, and SAP benchmarks....
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AMD announced its fourth quarter and 2011 results yesterday. The figures aren't bad in and of themselves, but the company's overall position headed into 2012 is decidedly uncertain. Yearly revenue was flat at $6.57B, with total net income for fiscal 2011 at $495M, up four percent from 2010. "AMD shipped more than 30 million APUs in 2011, resulting in record annual notebook revenue," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "The unmatched combination of computing and graphics capabilities in our low-power "Brazos" platform has made it our fastest ramping platform ever, paving the way for continued growth in key segments and geographies. Our server business has regained momentum, delivering two consecutive...
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In the wake of Bulldozer's weak desktop launch, there was some hope that server benchmarks would redeem the chip and give AMD a fighting chance against Intel in at least one of its three core markets. Recent reviews and a comprehensive roundup of formally published results, however, indicate that while BD fares a bit better in servers, it's far from vindicated. AMD's new 6200 Opterons (Interlagos) are often a sidewise move from the older 6100 series, which is based on Magny-Cours. Interlagos is essentially trapped by the same trio of issues that cripple Bulldozer. The shared core design hurts SMP scaling; a 16-core Interlagos scales more like a 13-14 core Magny-Cours. The clock speed increases...
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AMD has announced the immediate availability of new 12-16 core 32nm Opteron processors based on the company's new Bulldozer architecture. According to AMD, these new chips will provide better performance, virtualization scaling, and efficient economics. “Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualization has provided a new level of reliable consolidation and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency. We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. “The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over....
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In this latest episode of HotHardware's Two and Half Geeks, Dave, Iyaz and Marco discuss the Asus G74SX 17-inch gaming notebook, our round-up of 3 Terabyte hard drives from Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi, AMD's upcoming Bulldozer-based Interlagos 16-core server-class processor, the Zotac Zbox Nano AD10 Small Form-Factor PC and details of our Labor System Giveaway contest! Show Notes: 1:01 - ASUS G74-SX-A1 Gaming Notebook Review 5:01 - AMD Begins Revenue Shipments Of Bulldozer-Based 16-Core "Interlagos" Processors 7:47 - 3TB Hard Drive Round-up: Hitachi, Seagate, WD 12:27 - Zotac Zbox Nano AD10 Small Form-Factor PC Sneak Peek 17:00 - HotHardware's Labor Gaming System Giveaway Sweepstakes...
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We can’t quite spill the beans in regard to AMD’s upcoming Bulldozer-based desktop processors, codenamed Zambezi (yet), but the company made an announcement today that bodes well for those of you waiting to get your hands on AMD’s next-gen CPU architecture. In a short and to-the-point press release that hit the wire a few hours ago, AMD announced that they’ve shipped their first Bulldozer-based processors for server and enterprise applications, codenamed Interlagos. Initial production of Interlagos, which is a 16-core processor utilizing two eight-core dies on a single package, began in August and revenue shipments to customers has already started. AMD's "Interlagos"...
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AMD announced its share of the TOP500 supercomputer list has grown 15 percent in the past six months. The company credits industry trends, upgrade paths, and competitive pricing for the increase. Of the 68 Opteron-based systems on the list, more than half of them use the Opteron 6100 series processors. We covered the launch of Magny-Cours more than a year ago; AMD's current lineup includes the dodeca-core Opteron 6180 SE at 2.5GHz at one end and two low-power parts at the other. Magny-Cours adoption is important. Organizations typically don't upgrade HPC clusters with new CPUs, but AMD is billing Interlagos as a drop-in option for MC. As such, it'll offer up to 2x the cores (16x as compared to...
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AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processor has been an increasingly hot topic as its launch date creeps nearer, but the company has kept a great deal of information under wraps. That's now beginning to change; AMD plans to discuss Bulldozer more in-depth at the ISSCC conference currently underway. According to AMD Fellow Tim Fischer, Bulldozer was designed from the ground up to reduce power consumption. He writes: Changes in clocking, latching, power management and on-chip memories are part of the comprehensive circuit updates incorporated into Bulldozer. These are detailed in the paper, along with significant power reduction improvements, including clock gating, a new low-power flop design, and...
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Today was AMD's Analyst Day and the CPU manufacturer was anxious to show its execution triumphs and discuss future plans through 2011. One of the most important announcements concerns AMD's Brazos platform, which will debut running both Ontario and Zecate processors. As of today, the first Brazos shipments have begun, with products on store shelves as early as January. We've discussed Ontario and Zecate quite a bit in previous articles; these are both 40nm parts built by TSMC with an integrated CPU. While they aren't direct competition for Atom, they'll be slugging it out in a very similar space. The slide above illustrates how AMD wants to change the current integrated GPU paradigm. In current...
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