AMD Talks About Bobcat CPUs Being Used in the Cloud Server Market

Shortly after Intel Atom processors were launched some theorized about this chip being used for low-power cloud based servers, some companies even developing blade systems that were built on Atom CPUs, the same thing happening with AMD's Bobcat core right now.

This issues was addressed by John Fruehe, the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD, in a recent blog post as a number of clients have raised questions about Bobcat availability in the server market.

As you surely know, the Bobcat core will be used in AMD's upcoming Zacate and Ontario APU's and comes with a 9-18W power consumption, depending on the implementation.

From a performance perspective this is deemed to be faster than Atom, early testing suggesting that its Out-of-Order (OoO) architecture makes it particularly strong in single threaded applications.

However tempting this may sound for cloud system builders, AMD's Fruehe states that the present day Opteron 4100 and 6100 series processors can provide even lower power consumption figures while also being specially designed for the server environment as they come with ECC memory compatibility and support server OSs (through the AMD SR5600 series chipset).

Furthermore, using Bobcat-based systems could lead to higher operation costs as Fruehe reiterates on the AMD's blog.

“Clouds grow quickly and when they do, you will need to add more systems to scale out. The “Bobcat” core, just like the Intel Atom, is based on a single processor system,” wrote Fruehe.

“So, while you get really low power, you also don’t necessarily have the core density that cloud customers demand. This can impact the overall manageability of the solution.”

According to Fruehe, Bobcat based APUs consume between 4.5 and 9W per core while a Opteron 4100 series CPU can go as low as 5.33W/core, even 12 core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors reaching down to 5.41W/core.

Finally, Fruehe concludes that AMD will continue to evaluate and define their product roadmap in order to ensure they have the right products for the future, analyzing both Bulldozer and Bobcat core designs for future SoC's targeting the cloud server space.