AMD seeks mates for Opteron development

AMD HAS BEEN OUT banging the drum over Opteron. The company rates its success with the chip as nothing short of barnstorming. And, having achieved what Mercury tells it is now a 22 per cent market share, the chip maker has plans to eat further away at Intel's enterprise empire.

AMD's director of Commercial Solutions, Margaret Lewis, reckons the direct connect architecture of the new multi-core Opteron, due on August 1st, will provide the platform to propel to the company towards its target 30 per cent market share.

In a commercial space where Intel may have up to twelve different processor offerings, AMD hopes its simplified approach of using Opteron cores - as many as you like - bolted on to its bandwidth-friendly Direct Connect architecture will prove the easier option.

She claims the integration of the memory controller on the die allows processor cores or other components to be easily built into the platform. "The Direct Connect architecture allows more paths for flowing data. Processors, or memory can simple be snapped in, like Lego," she says.

AMD shows the flexibility of the approach with the example of a quad-core part that it claims draws the same power as a two-core part and which is upgradeable in the same scoket in the same motherboard.

The architecture is also well-suited to virtualisation, says Lewis. She says the AMD platform's memory handling system eliminates the overhead between virtual machines. Intel always has a separate controller hub, she says, which is not virtually aware.

AMD's approach to the market is differentiated from Intel's in its encouragement of partners to develop on this architecture. This was the thrust of the three initiatives handed down by CEO Hector Ruiz at AMD's latest analyst presentation: Torrenza, Trinity and Raiden.

Lewis suggests physics graphics processors or VOiP or IPTV modules could be bolted straight into the Hypertransport bus running around the Direct Connect architecture.

So AMD opened up the Opteron platform to third parties and, with its triad of initiatives, is encouraging them to pick up the platform and run with it. The bolt-on architecture, says Lewis, enables this collaborative approach.

Within three years, AMD put itself on the roadmaps of the major software makers such as Microsoft, the Linux distributors and Sun.

From this solid marker of recognition, it hopes to extend its reach into the commercial space. And to do it wants to draw in its friends to help mount the offensive. µ