AMD Launches New Platform for Dedicated Web Hosting Providers

New AMD Opteronâ„¢ 3200 Series Processor Family Changes Industry Economics for Single-Socket, Dedicated Hosting and Cloud customers

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -3/20/2012

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the latest solution as part of its ongoing Web/Cloud initiative with the launch of the new AMD Opteronâ„¢ 3200 Series processor. Dedicated Web hosting customers seeking enterprise-class reliability have a new choice that delivers:
• Great value with up to 38% better price performance1 and up to 19% less power per core2 than the competition;
• ECC memory and server reliability features at a low price-point;
• Fast hardware payback – In as few as 7 months hosting fees can cover hardware costs – up to 14% quicker than with the competition3;
• Efficient economics for the Cloud with twice the core density per rack4.

“In today’s economic environment, dedicated hosting providers need their data centers to become profit centers faster than ever,” said Patrick Patla, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. “With the new AMD Opteronâ„¢ 3000 Series platform, Web and Cloud customers no longer have to compromise with desktop-class platforms in order to hit certain price points. Now they have all the benefits of a true server-class product at desktop-class price points. This helps rapidly-growing hosting customers achieve fast payback in their incredibly dense, power-efficient environments.”

Since the launch of its new core server architecture, and AMD Opteron 4200 and 6200 Series processors last November, AMD unveiled a disruptive server strategy and intentions to leverage its leading graphics IP while driving down the power in future SoC offerings. As part of accelerating this, AMD recently announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cloud pioneer SeaMicro.

Today AMD has delivered on its promise of a low-power, single-socket solution that brings server functionality with desktop economics. The AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform is targeted to the dense, power efficient 1P Web hosting/Web server market. Available in either 4- or 8-core CPUs, the AMD Opteron 3200 Series processor is shipping today in platforms from MSI, Tyan, Fujitsu and Dell. Based on the “Bulldozer” core, the AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform leverages Socket AM3+ and provides customers with the cost savings associated with a “desktop-like” infrastructure, yet still offers server-class reliability, enterprise-class silicon validation/testing, security features and server OS certification.

“AMD is a great partner, and we’re excited about the new AMD Opteron 3200 Series CPU. It allows us to create a custom design for our DCS customers, and deliver a compelling combination of performance and energy efficiency, ” says Dell Data Center Solutions’ Steve Cumings. “As the leader in the Density-Optimized market segment, we require focused partner technology within industry standards – and this is a good fit for our customers.”

Key Facts, Performance and Technical Detail

• 45W to 65W TDP
• 2.7 GHz base frequency, up to 3.7 GHz frequency using AMD Turbo CORE technology5
• 4- and 8-core options
• 2 DDR3 memory channels supporting ECC UDIMM
• 1333, 1600, 1866 MHz memory speed6
• Supports 1.5V, 2Rank
• Up to 32GB memory capacity
• Supports up to 2 DIMMs per memory channel
• Total Cache: 16MB for 8-core, 8MB for 4-core
• L2 Cache: up to 8MB total
• L3 Cache: up to 8MB total

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 8x) and equal-to-faster clockspeeds. AMD’s corporate marketing VP, Leslie Solon, said the following:

The introduction of the AMD Opteron processor coincided with the HPC industry’s shift to x86 and cluster-based architecture, away from expensive proprietary or RISC-based systems,” said Leslie Sobon, corporate vice president, product marketing, AMD. “AMD provided the server technology that helped drive the democratization of supercomputing and has shown steadfast leadership in helping HPC break performance boundaries. Our new 16-core processor codenamed “Interlagos” will add features specifically for HPC and offer the world’s highest core count for x86. In addition to CPUs, we are also now seeing adoption of our GPU technologies in HPC and believe this will be a significant area for further development.

If current trends continue, AMD’s share of the supercomputer market will slowly rise. The chart is interesting in its own right. Intel’s share of the industry exploded virtually overnight, from a bare footnote in 2001 to a huge slice of the market in 2005. AMD’s Opteron debut went extremely well, but topped out in 2006. It fell steadily for several years thereafter, thanks to increased pressure from Intel’s Core architecture. Thus far, 2011 looks like a winning year, though we suspect Interlagos (currently scheduled for a Q3 debut) will make the difference.

According to the firm, Interlagos will feature multiple enhancements for HPC workloads, including a “Flex FP” technology. Presumably this refers to the fact that Bulldozer modules share an FPU. AMD is attempting to spin this as a positive and refers to Flex FP as “an innovation that allows for significant overall processor power savings when the Flex FP is not fully utilized.”

That’s not necessarily untrue. Bulldozer is quite different from any of AMD’s previous architectures. Previous K8/K10 processors were built for high performance first and foremost. Bulldozer, in contrast, is designed to maximize instruction execution efficiency and die size. AMD’s decision to build a single, powerful, shared FPU unit rather than building two completely separate cores may well reduce power consumption. The big question now is whether or not Bulldozer can deliver performance good enough to challenge Intel’s dominance.

LUCID TAKES VIRTU GRAPHICS VIRTUALIZATION TO MORE PLATFORMS, MORE SYSTEMS
New Virtu Universal Immediately Available for Notebooks, All-in-One and Desktop PCs based on Either AMD or Intel Integrated GPUs

KFAR NETTER, Israel and TAIPEI, Taiwan – COMPUTEX 2011 – June 1, 2011 – LucidLogix demonstrated today for the first time at Computex 2011 its Virtu™ Universal® GPU virtualization software, on notebooks, All-in-One (AiO) and desktop PCs based on both Intel® and AMD integrated graphics processing units (GPUs). Virtu Universal is a new product that builds on the capabilities of the popular LucidLogix Virtu™ GPU virtualization software for Intel Sandy Bridge H61, H67 and Z68-based motherboards.

Virtu Universal dynamically allocates graphics resources between integrated and discrete GPUs on Intel second-generation Core processors and AMD Brazos and Bulldozer platforms, allowing the systems to take full advantage of the processing power provided by both GPUs. Consumers will no longer have to choose between popular media processing features like Intel QuickSync video transcoding and DirectX 11 3D gaming performance. Virtu provides consistent, simultaneous performance with both.

“We’ve had an amazing adoption of Virtu on select Intel Sandy Bridge-based systems,” said Offir Remez, president and founder of Lucid. “It was a natural step for us to extend this capability to all Sandy Bridge platforms including notebooks and AiO PCs as well as sharing it with the AMD fanbase.”

Virtual Vsync Delivers No Compromise Game Performance and Quality

In addition to the recently introduced Lucid Virtu software benefits of complete media and 3D gaming performance, LucidLogix Virtu Universal also features Virtual Vsync benefiting all gamers from casual to hard-core who no longer have to compromise between visual quality and performance. Virtual Vsync delivers maximum gaming frame rates and responsiveness, while eliminating distracting and image-distorting visual tearing. Virtual Vsync breaks past the limits of standard Vsync (60 FPS) to deliver:

• Unlimited frame rates – some as much as 120 FPS and beyond with in-game Vsync on.
• User-defined frame rate and visual quality selection
• Flawless visual quality without tearing
• Maximum responsiveness to mouse and keyboard – some as much as 250 percent or more
• The infrastructure to support for next-generation platforms

“Once again, Lucid’s ongoing innovations in GPU virtualization keeps the end customer in mind and eliminates common performance and feature compromises on PCs,” added Remez. “We believe gamers will be amazed at the boost in visual quality and keyboard responsiveness provided in Virtu Universal enabled systems.”

Virtu Universal is available to system manufacturers using AMD Brazos and Bulldozer, Intel Sandy Bridge Z68/H67/H61, and other Intel integrated graphics, like the G41 platform. To date Virtu technology has been verified with hundreds of games and applications and is bundled with motherboards from many of the worlds’ leading brands. The flexible nature of Virtu Universal makes the technology highly likely to be found on a variety of upcoming mobile and desktop PCs this year. For more information, visit www.lucidlogix.com.

“We built the world’s first production petaflops system with the Cray XT5 supercomputer, reinvented high performance networking with the Gemini interconnect, and we are now redefining accelerator-based supercomputing with the unified GPU and scalar technologies built into the Cray XK6 system,” said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray’s product division.

A powerful addition to Cray’s line of highly-advanced supercomputers, the Cray XK6 system pairs AMD’s next-generation Opteron processors with up to 16 cores code-named Interlagos powered by the Bulldozer micro-architecture (up to 96 per cabinet) and Nvidia Tesla X2090-series compute cards (up to 96 per cabinet) to create a true hybrid supercomputer with intra-node flexibility. By combining AMD Opteron processors with Nvidia GPUs, the compute node in the Cray XK6 system gives users the option to run applications with either scalar or accelerator components with up to 70TFLOPS of compute performance per cabinet. The Cray XK6 compute blades can also be blended with Cray XE6 compute blades into a single, multi-purpose supercomputing system.

Upgradeable from Cray XT4, Cray XT5, Cray XT6 or Cray XE6 systems, the Cray XK6 system is expected to be available in the second half of 2011. It can be configured in a single cabinet with tens of compute nodes, to a multi-cabinet system with tens of thousands of compute nodes.

The Cray XK6 system introduces an new approach to increasing programmer productivity with a unified x86/GPU programming environment that includes tested and powerful tools, libraries, compilers and third-party software. When combined with the Cray Linux Environment, the result is a fully integrated Cray supercomputer that blends scalable hardware, software and a network. Cray XK6 customers will be able to utilize the capabilities of a multi-purpose supercomputer designed for the next-generation of many-core, high performance computing (HPC) applications.

“Every aspect of the Cray XK6 has been engineered to meet the real-world performance demands of researchers and scientists tasked with solving the world’s grand challenges. [...] We are leveraging our expertise to create a scalable hybrid supercomputer – and the associated first-generation of a unified x86/GPU programming environment – that will allow the system to more productively meet the scientific challenges of today and tomorrow,” added Mr. Bolding.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Manno, Switzerland is Cray’s first customer for the new Cray XK6 system. CSCS, which develops and promotes technical and scientific services for the Swiss research community in the field of HPC, signed a contract with Cray to upgrade its Cray XE6m system, nicknamed “Piz Palu,” to a multi-cabinet Cray XK6 supercomputer.

“GPUs are playing an increasingly important role in high performance computing as researchers and scientists look to augment the CPU performance on certain codes. Cray is a leader in the high-end of the supercomputing market and has designed, built and installed some of the world’s most powerful systems. The company has decades of experience in successfully integrating hybrid processor types into large scale systems. This strategy of hybrid supercomputing is extremely valuable, and Cray is in a good position to take advantage of it,” said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC.