Microsoft and AMD jointly developed Hammer chips

THE 22ND OF APRIL dawned to a drizzly day here in New York but AMD got positive support from IBM, a rather half-hearted endorsement by Sun Microsystems, while the only vendors to announce systems today are Fujitsu Siemens for a high end workstation, and IBM, for a range of server machines.

But by far the most interesting revelation, from Brian Valentine at Microsoft, was that it and AMD planned the introduction of the 64-bit processor family right from the start of the project.

Valentine said that his company will offer Windows Server 2003 with built in support for AMD. AMD and Microsoft had been in together on the development of a 64-bit processor.

Microsoft liked the idea of 64-bit computing being backward compatible with 32 bit applications, at a low cost, he claimed, and closely collaborated on its development.

Future OSes and applications will be optimised not just for the 64-bit platform but for 32-bit platforms too. The Opteron, he said, offered high performance for both types of software.

The performance wasn't limited to databases and high end computing platforms, he said. "It's about making 64-bit servers" and not just supporting databases and high end computing, he said. Server 2003, launched on the 24th, will support 64-bit Opterons in 32-bit mode, and in 64-bit mode later this year, he said.

Microsoft has tested the Opteron for many applications and it gives "amazing price performance", he said.

Microsoft is seeing excellent compatibility for 64-bit and 32-bit platforms, said Valentine.

There will be desktop applications as well as server applications.

Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD, said there was "no big top tier vendor that wasn't evaluating Opterons and its 64-bit chip family.

More positive support for AMD came from a number of leading software vendors, including Microsoft, Mandrakesoft, SuSE Linux, Oracle and others joining in the party.

Sun will only support 32-bit Opterons, it appears, for Java - that's a shame for AMD - big databases seem to be a little out of the question right now, although the firm said there would be more positive news on the Java 64 front later this year.

Itanic the "future of perverted computing"
The press conference kicked off with a dig at Intel's Itanium, which one suit described as the future of perverted computing.

Sanders said today was a realisation of his dream.

Hector Ruiz, the CEO of AMD said it was time for the industry to change its ways and listen to its customers.

Customers, he claimed, needed access to 64-bit computing and the enterprise was the first point of adoption. Change had to be expected but the cost of adopting new technology had to include price, he said.

The Opteron, said chairman Jerry Sanders III, said, contained 100 million transistors and described the die as smaller than your smallest fingernail. He described the Opteron as member of the Microsoft family of CPUs and will transform the price of computers.

There will be a die shrink for desktop systems in Q4 of this year, AMD disclosed.

Sanders said the technology was only of use when it became widely available. AMD 64 was the next step in the X86 platform, he said.

Marty Seyer, who runs the enterprise division at AMD, said that business people had to make tough decisions in one of the most hostile business environments ever. They, he said, wanted to do with more with less. The 240, 242 and 244 were, he claimed, the highest performing 32-bit processors around. Later this quarter AMD will start selling 800 and 100 systems.

He introduced a validated server programme for the Opterons to speed products to market.

The Opteron will run 10,000 existing 32-bit applications on a 64-bit CPU for the first time, and at speed, as well as offering room for the future, said Seyer. The Opteron 800 will allow eight way 64-bit systems for under $10,000 - a quarter of the price of the competition. He said Intel needed to watch out. "Even the paranoid may not survive," he said.

He claimed the Opteron is faster not just in the 32-bit realm but for 64-bit processors too. The Opteron outperforms both Xeon and Itanium, Seyer claimed. It beats the Xeon by 37 per cent and the Itanium 2 900MHz by 79 per cent.

He claimed that by the end of this year AMD would ship more 64-bit chips than Intel has shipped Itanium chips since that processor launched. Further, he claimed later, in the first four months it would sell more of those chips than Intel sold Itaniums in the first four quarters.

Software
A CA representative claimed it only took two days to port the Ingres database from 32-bit to 64-bit, without a glitch.

IBM said it will support the Opteron for its DB2 database. Bob Picciano, from the DB division of IBM, said that it had successfully worked with customers and is making a DB2 beta available on a public web site. IBM will make DB2 generally available for Opteron over the next few months. DB2 only took two days to port, another IBM representative said.

The combination of DB2 and Opteron allowed scaling of even thousands of nodes. DB2 on Linux on the Opteron is "ready for business" he said, passing a validation certificate to Ruiz.

Microsoft said it will offer SQL Server for the Windows Opteron platform.

Doug Kennedy from Oracle said that he believed the Opteron would change the cost of software. 9i technology and Opterons gave excellent results, he said.

Oracle's 9i database for the Opteron has 15 independent security evaluations and has very high performance. The performance numbers in early testing were good, said Oracle, although no figures were specified.

Mark Shearer from IBM's eServer division, said that the Opterons will impact the high performance scientific and technical computing market.

Opteron is a natural evolutionary path, said Shearer, with the chip offering "compelling performance at an affordable price", particularly for apps like oil exploration or image rendering.

IBM is number one in high ending and supercomputing in the world, he said. IBM will deliver an Opteron based server platform. IBM will also offer Opterons in its high end computing business.

SuSE and Red Hat both endorsed the Opteron as platforms for their 64-bit Linux operating systems.

More, and pictures, to follow in a separate story. µ