AMD opens socket, architecture to third parties

AMD MARKETING man Marty Seyer said that the firm has revised its target and wants to leave 2006 with 30% server market share instead of the 20% it had predicted.

Speaking to a roomful of analysts, Seyer said that there were currently 50 platforms supporting Opterons. He said AMD grew from 16% in Q4 05 to 22% in Q1 06.

He said Intel was reacting to what he claimed was AMD's leadership but he said they were comparing future products to its current shipping products.

He said that if you compared Opterons to the futue Woodcrests AMD will continue to have the leadership crown for performance per watt.

"We rate our products at the maximum wattage, while the competition rates its at something less than that," he claimed.

He claimed AMD will become the default architecture for blades because of the power consumption. At HP, 75% of blade designs use AMD technology, he said. Torrenza, Trinity, and Raiden are codewords for future tech AMD will release. Torrenza will allow the licensing of hypertransport and other elements.

It will open the socket and the architecture to third parties. Accelerator cards can be linked to AMD architecture tighly coupled to core silicon, he said. A two socket design could use one socket for microprocessing, and the other for security, or using a media accelerator in step with a CPU, or an XML server, or a gaming co-processor. Intel won't open up its architecture, with broad acceptance for different sectors of the market. Sun, HP, and Cray are backing this cunning plan, he said.

Trinity is a set of security features which has an integrated approach to servers and to clients, including virtualisation. The client side will be an open standard with an open management partition on both server and client side, extensible by third parties.

Raiden is a concept to re-invent the client. IT departments have nightmares about image management and need to reduce the costs. The initiative is aimed at "re-inventing the commercial client," he said. But he was a very thin client on hard details of what this Raiden thing is, or will be. µ