14 DAY TRIAL // AMD announced that several AMD Opteron processor-based systems are listed among the world's highest-performing supercomputers, as determined by the Top500 Organization during the 21st International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany, according to Information Week.
Tsubame, the computer we have already talked about this week, is based on more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and Sun Systems' latest Sun Fire servers. It seems that, in the tests which took place in May, Tsubame proved to be more than powerful, "ranking" no less than ... 38.18 teraflops.
"Supercomputer developers were among the first to embrace the AMD Opteron processor," stated Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD. "Since that time, traditional enterprise datacenters, facing the same rigorous performance, value, power and cooling requirements, are increasingly choosing AMD Opteron processor-based systems. We are demonstrating that AMD64 is the innovation platform for the future, through our planned quad-core processor roadmap, and our recently announced Torrenza program which allows for the development of special purpose accelerators that will take computing potential to the next level."
Furthermore, AMD's quad-core Opteron processor with DDR2 memory was already adopted by Cray Inc., a company which signed a contract with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in order to develop the world's first petaflops-speed (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer. The advantage presented by AMD's Opteron is the embedded Direct Connect Architecture featuring HyperTransport technology, which offers scalability for multiprocessor operating.
"Cray is continuing its long-term commitment to building our next-generation platforms on AMD64 technology," declared Peter Ungaro, Cray president and CEO . "All Cray supercomputers are designed to accommodate future higher density multi-core processors in order to leverage and protect our customers' investment in these systems. The recently announced upgrades to ORNL's Cray XT3 supercomputer will ensure ORNL is operating on the most advanced platform to serve their computing needs well into the future."
According to a Mercury Research results used by Information Week, the market share owned by AMD in the first quarter was 22.1 %, as it has grown 35% from the Q4 of 2005 and no less than 199% from Q1 of 2005.