Vendors flock to AMD's Barcelona
Vendors pledge support to Microporocessor giant's latest offering
Server and components manufacturers have rallied around ailing AMD by showcasing the company’s forthcoming ‘Barcelona’ processors in new systems.
Supermicro, Asus, Uniwide and Tyan have come out in support of the next generation Opteron processor, which AMD claimed is the first native quad-core processor for servers. The Barcelona chip will deliver up to 80 per cent performance and performance-per-watt, and improvements on many key server applications over existing Opteron processors.
The new chips will have a key advantage by being drop-in compatible with existing Opteron systems that use low-power Double Data Rate 2 memory, allowing customers to keep many of their existing servers.
Platforms on show at the Computex Show in Taipei from Supermicro and Uniwide highlighted many new features, including Barcelona’s Dual Dynamic Power Management, which can direct power independently to the CPU and to the memory controller, resulting in better performance and power management.
Danny Hsu, president of Tyan, said: “We commend AMD for its non-disruptive roadmaps, allowing for a smooth upgrade from dual-core to quad-core. Streamlining and mitigating the complexities customers often face when upgrading their IT infrastructure is especially important in today’s competitive market place.”
Randy Allen, corporate vice-president, server and workstation division at AMD, said: “Those buying second generation AMD Opteron processors today can take advantage of the seamless upgrade potential designed into our high performing quad-core processors when they become available later this year, and do so within the same power and cooling infrastructure.”
Alex Hsu, chief sales and marketing officer at Supermicro, said: “The architecture benefits of AMD’s ‘Barcelona’ processors and allows us to deliver incredible compute density in a 4P blade server featuring 160 cores per 7U enclosure and up to 960 cores per rack. Customers will certainly benefit from the combination of AMD’s outstanding performance-per-watt and Supermicro’s earth-friendly, high-efficiency designs.”
The new Barcelona processors will launch in Q3.