Items tagged with Opteron
AMD is adding a new family of Opterons to its enterprise processor line-up today called the Opteron A1100 series. Unlike AMD’s previous enterprise offerings, however, these new additions are packing ARM-based processor cores, not the X86 cores AMD has been producing for years. The Opteron A1100 series is designed for a variety of use cases and applications, including networking, storage, dense and power-efficient web serving, and 64-bit ARM software development.The Opteron A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), was formerly codenamed “Seattle” and it represents the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. The AMD Opteron A1100 utilizes off-the-shelf ARM Cortex-A57 processor cores, with integrated...
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Today, AMD is launching a pair of power-optimized server parts based on what it calls the "Warsaw" refresh. These chips are still Piledriver-based, but AMD claims that the new core offers an optimal performance per watt solution for virtualization without breaking the corporate bank account. "With the continued move to virtualized environments for more efficient server utilization, more and more workloads are limited by memory capacity and I/O bandwidth," said Suresh Gopalkrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, AMD. "The Opteron 6338P and 6370P processors are server CPU's optimized to deliver improved performance-per-watt for virtualized private cloud deployments...
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Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly on to their own motherboards to support AMD's chip. Such a move would shift the RMA responsibilities for RAM failures back to the board manufacturer. Given the limited upselling capabilities and low market share AMD currently enjoys, it seemed unlikely that Sunnyvale would consider such an option. A deep dive into Kaveri's technical documentation, however, shows that AMD did indeed...
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AMD's launching a new chip tonight, but it's probably not one you'll soon find in a consumer machine. Instead, the workstation-focused Opteron line is gaining a new member with the X-Series family. It's said to be the industry's highest performance small-core x86 server chip, and they'll go by the codename Kyoto. AMD says they're the highest density, most power-efficient small core x86 processors ever built, with the new X1150 and X2150 chips besting the top-class Atom CPUs in key benchmarks. The AMD Opteron X-Series processors come in two variants. The AMD Opteron X2150, which consumes as little as 11 watts, is the first server APU system-on-a-chip integrating CPU and GPU engines with...
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AMD announced its earnings today, with figures that generally reflected to poor state of the entire PC industry. Normally, this is where I'd delve into those figures and run the numbers. Not this time. AMD's conference call and Q&A session were interesting enough that the company's Q1 performance can be dealt with relatively quickly. The PC market was awful. AMD lost money. The company has enough cash on hand (thanks to selling its HQ in a lease-back arrangement) to make it through the second quarter. Computing solutions revenue really did take a hammering this quarter, falling to $751M (down nearly 40% year-on-year. The company didn't dwell on that fact, but it's not a sustainable...
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AMD's fourth quarter results for 2012 are in, and they're as bad as everyone has been expecting. The only good news is that since everyone has been expecting it, the company's stock shouldn't take too hard a hammering. Total revenue for the year was $5.42B, down 17.5% year-on-year. Gross margins fell from 45% to 23% thanks to a much higher cost of sales. AMD ended 2012 with a $1.1B net loss, compared to a $486M income in 2011. Computing Solutions (CPU sales) revenue fell to $4B for the year, down from $5B in 2011. Graphics revenue was down 10% year-on-year, to $1.41B in sales, as opposed to $1.565B for 2011. There are a few glimmers of positive news. Computing solutions revenue was down sharply,...
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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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AMD CEO Rory Read has announced that the company intends to develop dense computing platforms based on the 64-bit ARM architecture today. This is the second major collaboration between AMD and ARM; Sunnyvale announced earlier this year that it would integrate an ARM core to provide additional hardware-level security on future APUs. The meat of AMD's announcement today is that it's going to leverage the SeaMicro acquisition of earlier this year to ensure it has a platform for its own products. SeaMicro's Freedom Fabric virtualizes a great deal of technology that's normally built into hardware on a typical motherboard and reportedly saves a great deal of power and improves server density by doing...
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After its conference call last week, AMD is jonesing for some positive news to toss investors and is planning a major announcement on Monday to that effect. Rumor suggests that a number of statements may be coming down the pipe, including the scope of the company's layoffs, new parts based on Piledriver Opterons, and possibly an ARM server announcement. The latter would be courtesy of AMD's investment in SeaMicro. SeaMicro built its business on ultra-low power servers, and the first 64-bit ARMv8 silicon is expected in the very near future, but there's always a significant lag between chip announcements and actual shipping products. Even if AMD announces Monday, it'd be surprising to see a core...
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Grim tidings abound at AMD this quarter, confirming some of our worst fears and raising serious questions about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. Revenue for the quarter was $1.27 billion, a decrease of 10% sequentially and 25% year-on-year. The company reported a net loss of $157M and has announced a new restructuring (read: massive layoffs) plan. The company's gross margin plummeted to 31%, down from 45% last quarter. The decline in gross margin was driven by an inventory write-down on the value of the unsold hardware AMD was carrying at the end of Q2. Despite this, AMD's inventory levels remain worryingly high. The company is currently sitting on $744M of unsold hardware,...
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Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) starts on Tuesday, and the chip manufacturer is expected to discuss its Ivy Bridge refresh, Haswell, talk about its upcoming 32nm tablet platform, Clover Trail, and possibly share a few details on its 22nm Atom SOC's. Performance per watt is going to be a major focus at IDF this year; Haswell is rumored to be capable of idling below 10W. Intel always uses IDF as a demonstration platform and roadmap update, but it's particularly important this year, when competing foundries have struggled with 28nm and Intel itself just cut its Q3 guidance. Several of Intel's rivals are gearing up their own demonstrations for this week. In AMD's case, that's normal -- Sunnyvale almost...
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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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Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. Sun's T1 processor, codenamed Niagara and introduced in 2005, rejected a conventional focus on single-thread performance in favor of an aggressively multi-threaded, multi-core approach. CPU clock speeds were purposefully kept low to minimize power consumption. The Niagara T1, introduced in 2005 The T1, which was introduced in 2005, ran at a maximum of 1.4GHz and offered a maximum of eight cores, with each core capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads. The T3, released last year, is clocked at up to 1.67GHz,...
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With Bobcat and Llano launched, AMD has one more major product overhaul set for this year. The company's Bulldozer CPU will launch in the next few months, and after years of waiting, enthusiasts and IT industry analysts are both curious to see what AMD has in its high performance pipeline. A Turkish website, Donanim Haber, recently got its hands on what they claim is a Bulldozer FX processor--but while we're going to talk about the site's findings, we'd recommend readers take them with some caution. The new octal-core processor is an AMD FX-8130P running at 3.2GHz base speed, what's reported as a 3.7GHz Turbo speed, and a 4.2GHz clock speed if only half the CPU's cores are in use. This implies...
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As a consumer, you may think the entire computer universe revolves around you. It's a "me, me, me" world, so why not? In truth, consumer sales make up just a fraction of the earnings from major silicon makers like AMD, Intel and HP, and chips like the Opteron maintain their importance despite not being marketed directly at consumers. AMD has just taken the lid off of their Opteron 6000 Series, but in a new way. That platform actually debuted in 2010, but there's more than ever happening within that department now. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform’s compatibility with the next generation 16-core processor, codenamed “Interlagos,” has gained the attention of customers in the...
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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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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at the highest-end of the server / mainframe market. It may also be the Itanium that fully redeems the brand name and sheds the last vestiges of negativity that have dogged the chip since it launched ten years ago… Intel Previews 32nm Itanium "Poulson" Processor...
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