World’s Most Efficient Xeon Server Ever Built Is AMD’s SM15000

AMD’s SeaMicro server division is well known for their Freedom Fabric connectivity technology where the I/O, storage and processing units are all being coordinated through a silicon PHY implementation developed by the latter.

SeaMicro used to build Intel-based servers, but once AMD acquired it, Opteron processors were also added to the list.

Recently, AMD announced the SeaMicro SM15000 server and we’ve reported that here, but what we didn’t have were all the details and slides detailing the event.

Hardware experts at Bridghtsideofnews.com have managed to get their hands on some interesting technological presentation slides that reportedly advertise what AMD calls “most efficient Inter Xeon server ever built.”

We wonder if HP’s own National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) project that we’ve described here is not the most efficient HPC data center anymore.

Even so, AMD is able to deliver impressive density as its own servers take 74% less space than Intel’s own Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge Xeon server implementations.

In fact, AMD’s SM15000 5 Petabyte storage cluster implementation uses 160 less operating system licenses than a classical Intel counterpart and 186 less power cables.

This is an amazing achievement from SeaMicro and AMD, but the most important aspects are the fact that the SM15000 uses only half the energy Intel’s implementation needs and costs exactly 50% less.

Despite the fact that AMD’s Opteron may not offer superior performance to Intel’s Xeon Ivy Bridge processors, the Piledriver enhanced Opterons bring twice the CPU core and RAM density.

Therefore, an Opteron powers SM15000 will have 2024 core per rack while the Intel version “only” brings 1024 cores.

It will also offer 16,384 GB or RAM per rack while the Xeon Ivy Bridge implementation will “only” have a maximum of 8192 GB of RAM.