14 DAY TRIAL // When approaching the server market, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have taken somewhat different approaches. Intel's chips focus on better performance with less cores, whereas AMD makes a point of adding more cores in order to provide greater server scalability. Intel's Xeon 5600 server chips only recently launched, but combined with the Gulftown six-core ship for consumers, they have already reached over 100,000 shipments. Of course, AMD will not lightly back down, having itself revealed that its Magny-Cours have significant industrial support of their own.
According to recent reports, AMD's new Magny-Cours Opteron CPUs are meant to transform the server market thanks to their use of 12 x86 processing engines and fast chip-to-chip interconnection. On the other hand, what may act as an impediment is the fact that these chips need new mainboards with new sockets and the AMD SR5690/SP5100 core-logic in order to operate. This means that industrial support is a must if these chips are to have a chance. Fortunately for AMD, the company seems to have found sixteen makers of servers that will unveil machines powered by its new processors, namely Appro, ASUS, Colfax, Gigabyte, MSI, SGI and ZT Systems, among others. These companies will reveal their respective offerings over the next few weeks.
“Our industry partners are ready to showcase the advantages of AMD’s new Direct Connect Architecture 2.0. The additional performance enabled with more cores, more memory channels and more features is a value their customers are eager to put to work,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, server and embedded divisions at AMD.
“AMD has the right strategy to capitalize on the rebounding server market by offering targeted platforms for the high end and low end of the volume market. We are able to offer extreme performance scalability in one platform, while delivering cost efficiency and unrivaled power efficiency in the other. When it comes to addressing customer’s needs with a smarter platform and overall value, we are going to beat the competition. Period,” Mr. Patla added.
The report also makes the interesting observation that first-tier server suppliers IBM, Dell and HP are, curiously, not listed among these manufacturers, even though they did, in the past, offer their own Opteron systems. Whether they also join the many-cores movement remains to be seen, but until then, AMD seems to be optimistic about its chances.
“MSI has developed the new 8- and 12-core regular server platform solutions for enterprise environments that demand high density and expandability. These customers’ workloads also require reliability, availability and security features that the new AMD Opteron 6100-series processor brings to this new product line,” said Norman Tsai, vice president of enterprise platform R&D division at MSI. AMD Is Ready to Attack: “We Are Going to Beat the Competition”
In the mean time, Intel's own server chips are being adopted by IBM, HP, SGI, Fujtisu, Dell, Cray and Cisco, among others. It will be interesting to see which approach will be more successful.