AMD today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle.1 With IT decision-makers looking to do more with less, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt, the company said. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the new processor, codenamed "Shanghai."
"Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers," said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. "In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future. This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world's first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago. Simply put, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right technology at the right time."
Performance Leadership
Data center managers are facing escalating pressures from the computing demands of enterprise workloads, like Web serving and database applications, and the need to do more with less in the current IT spending climate, the company said. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, which has posted 60 percent year over year growth2 in the second quarter of this year, are being rapidly deployed but require a balanced solution. The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors further enhance AMD's unique Direct Connect Architecture and offer a superior balanced and scalable solution to support today's increasingly heterogeneous computing environments.
Unsurpassed Virtualization Performance
Through improvements to AMD's architecture and innovative AMD-Virtualization (AMD-V) technology, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors build on AMD's legacy as the virtualization platform of choice, the company said, with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor already powering nine global OEM servers specifically designed for virtualization. The new processors deliver faster "world switch" time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency, and feature improved Rapid Virtualization Indexing, AMD's innovation in AMD-V that reduces the overhead associated with software virtualization.
Unparalleled Price/Performance
The enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:
• Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
• A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java.
• DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
• Upcoming enhancements to the revolutionary AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.
Unequaled Energy-Efficiency
Already offering industry-leading x86 server processor performance-per-watt, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors draw up to 35 percent less power at idle compared to the previous generation while delivering up to 35 percent more performance, and feature a number of new power-saving technologies, the company said. AMD Smart Fetch technology can help reduce power consumption by allowing cores to enter a "halt" state during processing idle times with zero impact on application performance and compliments AMD CoolCore technology, which reduces power to unused sections of each processor to further reduce power consumption.
In similarly configured platforms, the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron 75W processor-based platform offers up to a 30 percent performance to power ratio advantage over the 50W processor-based competitive platform. For these platforms, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform only used 138W at active idle compared to the Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform using 179W at active idle. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform had a SPECpower_ssj2008 overall 761 ssj_ops/Watt, (308,089 ssj_ops @ 100% target load), according to the company. The Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform had a SPECpower_ssj2008 result of 561 overall ssj_ops/Watt (267,804 ssj_ops @ 100 percent target load).3
Unmatched Platform Stability
45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors continue AMD's leadership as the only x86 server microprocessor manufacturer to serve 2P to 8P servers with a single architecture, while maintaining socket and thermal compatibility with the previous generation of Quad-Core and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. This helps customers reduce platform management complexity and costs and increase data center uptime and productivity. These new processors fit into the existing Socket 1207 architecture and are also planned for use in the upcoming "Istanbul" processor, the next generation of AMD Opteron processors.
Global OEM Support
Due in part to the AMD Opteron processor's status as the industry's most manageable and consistent x86 server platform, global OEM and system-builder partners enjoyed a rapid validation process and are expected to begin shipping their next-generation systems powered by the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor this month. The number of available enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems is expected to grow rapidly throughout this quarter and the first quarter of 2009.
"Customers can drive down costs through new 'Shanghai'-based HP ProLiant servers that set new levels of power efficiency and performance," said Paul Gottsegen, vice president, marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "HP has experienced unparalleled success over the past four years working with AMD in bringing AMD Opteron processor-based platforms to customers of all sizes. Early results indicate 'Shanghai' is a winner."
"Sun's innovative systems design together with Solaris and the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor creates an incredibly powerful, scalable, energy efficient x64 platform for virtualization and consolidation," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's servers based on the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can handle the most complex data sets and scale as the data center grows, and with generation-to-generation platform continuity, customers can be confident the new systems will fit seamlessly into existing AMD Opteron deployments."
"Dell and AMD have a shared commitment to providing businesses with a full line-up of powerful products that simplify and lower the cost of managing IT environments," said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell's Business Product Group. "Our PowerEdge servers are specifically designed to take advantage of the virtualization features AMD has built into its chips. That close collaboration has paid off with record breaking virtualization performance for all 2 and 4 socket rack and blade PowerEdge servers."
"Since 2003, IBM has leveraged the capabilities of AMD Opteron processors and Direct Connect Architecture to help satisfy compute-intensive demands of customers across the enterprise and provide them choice," said Alex Yost, vice president of IBM BladeCenter. "IBM is building innovation on top of the energy efficiency and virtualization performance of the new processor to deliver exceptional value to our customers."
Availability
The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors at the 75-watt ACP ranging from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz are available immediately, with enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors planned to follow in Q1 2009.
Upcoming 45nm Desktop Processors
AMD also plans to bring this higher-performance and more energy efficient 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in Q1 2009 with the AMD platform codenamed "Dragon." This platform will be the second generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first generation AMD "Spider" platform released in 2008. The AMD "Dragon" platform is designed to harness the power of fusion by optimizing the performance of new 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with award-winning AMD 700 Series chipsets and award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.
Visit AMD on the Web
For more information on the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor including FAQs, development tools, online press kits and other general information, please visit http://multicore.amd.com. Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at http://www.amd.com/pricing.
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.
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1 Based on comparison of Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor codenamed "Shanghai" vs. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed "Barcelona" on the VMmark virtualization benchmark. For details and system configuration see http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html.
2 Compared to Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor codenamed "Barcelona." Benchmarks published on amd.com as of November 13, 2008, show the following performance gains compared to systems based on "Barcelona": SPECint®_rate2006: 32%; SPECfp®_rate2006: 32%; SPECjbb®2005: 64%. See http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/ 0,,30_118_8796_8800,00.html. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.) For the latest results, see www.spec.org.
3 Information based on IDC's worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker for virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21473108
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