14 DAY TRIAL // Back in March, during the WorldHostingDays event, Advanced Micro Devices put together a presentation (PDF file) in which it revealed a few things about a new series of microprocessors called Kyoto.
Found here, the file, titled “A Vision for Tomorrow’s Hosting Data Center,” says that Advanced Micro Devices Kyoto processors will have “small core” x86 architecture.
The processor will be available in both CPU (central processing unit) and APU (accelerated processing unit) versions, which isn't really a surprise.
The ultra-low TDP (thermal design power) of 9W is, likewise, not much of a shock.
In fact, the only surprise here is that we, like the rest of the world, didn't discover this information earlier.
It took HP's release of the Project Moonshot super low-power servers to make people look deeper for whatever AMD might have that will challenge the Intel CPUs used there (Atom S1200).
In the meantime, The Inquirer has learned that Kyoto Opteron processors will be available as part of cartridges and will mostly be geared towards media workloads. The APU versions at least.
Speaking of them, the chips with integrated GPUs will have power consumption of 11 Watts or more.
AMD's Kyoto platform will be officially introduced at some point during the second half of 2013.
Given the modular approach in HP Moonshot, which is responsible for the 89% drop in energy requirements and 80% reduction in necessary space, we rather suspect that HP will use something similar for AMD-powered systems.
That said, we do not know what other system and data center builders are negotiating or have already established contracts with Advanced Micro Devices for the use of Kyoto microserver processing units. Given the likely benefits, we have a hard time seeing HP running unopposed.
That it was the first to exhibit such an advancement in server architecture with Moonshot is already noteworthy enough.