Items tagged with Magny-Cours
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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Nvidia has finished work on a new supercomputer at Oak Ridge that showcases the company's K20 Tesla GPUs. The new cluster, dubbed Titan, is expected to break the 20 petaflop barrier. The system is a major upgrade to the Jaguar supercomputer that proceeded it (Jaguar was prominently upgraded last year to AMD's new Bulldozer CPUs after utilizing Magny-Cours products. The net effect of the upgrade has boosted Titan's raw computing power tenfold, while occupying the same floor space as the previous Jaguar system. The supercomputer now contains 18,688 nodes (299,008 CPU cores), with each node built around the AMD Opteron 6274 and Tesla K20. "One challenge in supercomputers today...
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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 revised its purchase agreement with Global Foundries in a move that will allow the CPU design firm to recognize a $492 million non-cash gain in Q1. Instead of purchasing 45nm and 32nm wafers on a "cost-plus" basis, Sunnyvale will pay GlobalFoundries a fixed price for products through the end of the year. Reactions to the change have been mixed. The fixed-price model allows AMD to only pay for viable 32nm parts, but raises questions about GlobalFoundries' 32nm yields. AMD's ownership stake in GF has fallen considerably in the past two years, but GloFo remains Sunnyvale's premier foundry partner by a sizeable margin. According to the company's presentation, the original wafer purchase agreements...
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Enthusiasts and professionals alike have long been curious about Bulldozer's performance. It's been hard to predict how the CPU will perform compared to Intel's Nehalem and Sandy Bridge; Bulldozer's unique shared execution units are a considerable departure from anything else on the market. Leaked benchmarks courtesy of openbenchmarking.org have shed some light on what we might see when the processor launches. David Kanter of Real World Technologies has compared the Bulldozer results against Magny-Cours performance, but warns that it's unwise to draw conclusions based on engineering samples. There's a dearth of information regarding which compiler options were selected or if AVX was enabled....
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At Hot Chips 22 today, AMD will be discussing new details of its Bobcat and Bulldozer processors—but don't be surprised if some of the new information sounds familiar. With the exception of a few tidbits on Bobcat's architecture and a new Bulldozer block diagram, much of what the company discussed with us recently was revealed last November at the company's Analyst Day. For those of you who might not keep up with the company's roadmap, here's the current situation. Llano, the 32nm Phenom II-derived APU (read: CPU+GPU) that AMD was hoping to launch at the end of Q4 this year won't tip up until Q1. Normally this means "March 31st," but AMD implied that it might launch...
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When AMD released its second quarter financial results last month it didn't say much about server volumes or market share, save to note that its performance "met expectations." The major news of the call turned out to be the company's decision to pull Bobcat's launch into 2010 and push Llano into 2011, which defrayed most conversation on market share. If AMD's server sales were indeed within the company's expectations, it can only mean the company was expecting to be pummeled. According to IDC's figures, Intel finished Q2 with 93.5 percent of the server market, up 3.3 percent, while AMD's share decreased to 6.5 percent, down by the same amount. That's rather depressing news considering AMD's...
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When AMD's 8-12 core Magny-Cours architecture launched three months ago, we noted that it was simply the first step in a two-pronged refresh and the beginning of a top-to-bottom revamp of AMD's server offerings. As of today, AMD has finished that process; the company's new Opteron 4100 series (codenamed Lisbon) updates the 4-6 core server products the same way Magny-Cours updated and extended the upper end of the server market. Unlike Magny-Cours, AMD's Lisbon series features the same 4-6 cores that have been available via existing Istanbul/Shanghai processors, but deliver several CPU and chipset enhancements. Lisbon CPUs now support the power-saving C1E mode which can substantially reduce processor...
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Intel reported its sales figures for the first quarter of 2010 yesterday, and the company's market position could scarcely be better. Revenue in Q1 was $10.3 billion—a record for the quarter—while sales declined just three percent between Q4 2009 and Q1 2010. Processor shipments typically fall about nine percent during this period; Intel didn't just beat the odds, it trounced them. "The investments we're making in leading edge technology are delivering the most compelling product line-up in our history," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. "These leadership products combined with growing worldwide demand and continued outstanding execution resulted in Intel's best first quarter ever....
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Intel launched its much-anticipated Nehalem-EX processor today; the new chip could redefine performance at 4P and above. Nehalem-EX, aka Beckton, aka Xeon 6500/7500 is Nehalem at full throttle; Beckton is an eight-core/16-thread processor with up to 24MB of L3 cache or ~3MB per core compared to Nehalem's 2MB/core design. It supports up to four QPI links for glueless design implementations and features a quad-channel memory controller capable of controlling up to 16 DIMMs per socket. Intel has released a number of SKUs with different core counts, one without Hyper-Threading, varying amounts of L3 cache, and clockspeeds ranging from 1.73GHz-2.26GHz for the Hyper-Threaded CPUs and 2.66GHz one model...
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AMD launched its new Maranello server platform and accompanying 8-12 core Magny-Cours processors today. The new products are two prongs of a three-pronged offensive AMD has launched at its rival. Both Magny-Cours and Maranello are evolutionary products—we'll have to wait for Bulldozer to really shake things up—but the CPU manufacturer has aggressively overhauled and flattened its price structure. That revamp is the third prong and it's the anchor of AMD's 2010-2011 strategy.More Cores, Different SocketMagny-Cours is a twelve-core processor built by stacking two Istanbul chips side-by-side. Unlike previous AMD processors, Magny-Cours is an MCM (multi-chip module), the eight-core version of...
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Intel announced its new Xeon 5600 series today in a move the company claims is great for server admins, businesses concerned about security, world peace, and puppies. (We made those last two up). The new chips (codenamed Gulftown) are basically identical to the ultra-high-end Core i7-980X that Intel launched recently, with the exception that Xeons are MP capable. Intel claims that the new six-core processors are up to 50 percent faster than their quad-core, 45nm counterparts while remaining within the same 130W TDP envelope. Although, low-power 60W variants are also coming, as are 40W quad-cores."The Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series will be the backbone of mainstream computing environments,"...
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We've already covered AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours processor and associated Maranello server platform in some detail, but AMD is apparently wanting to build some buzz around its new hardware. Over at his AMD blog, AMD's director of product marketing John Fruehe recently spilled the beans on a 48-core contest. The AMD Server team is kicking March off with a new contest. We are seeking your best essays, videos, or blog posts documenting how you might use 48 cores...Tell us what you can do with 48 cores to make the world a better, more interesting place, delivering the top performance or optimizing power. Of course creativity will be awarded, so don’t be afraid to show the fun side of servers...Here’s...
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In a blog post yesterday, AMD's director of product marketing John Fruehe announced that the company is now shipping its eight and 12-core "Magny-Cours" processors to OEMs and select manufacturers. Magny-Cours, you may recall, is AMD's next-generation server CPU and consists of two Istanbul cores side-by-side on the same package. Since AMD has no native octal-core design, it's implied that the eight-core version of Magny-Cours consists of two Istanbul processors with two cores on each disabled. If Magny-Cours is more-or-less an Istanbulx2, however, the upcoming Maranello platform is something altogether different. Maranello, which uses an LGA-style pinout, supports 16-48 cores, and provides each...
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