AMD works Shanghai Java for oriental Opteron

CHIMPZILLA is working with Java systems developers to optimise the performance of Java Virtual Machines on its new Shanghai lines of processors.

AMD's Shanghai series fabbed on 45nm technology feature larger caches, a new version of Hyper Transport technology and lower power consumption. Shanghai chips also implement AMD's Instruction Based Sampling (IBS) performance monitoring.

AMD is collaborating with JVM designers at Sun, IBM and Oracle to develop ways to use IBS data to improve JVM performance, according to Ben Pollan, AMD Java Labs manager.

A central challenge - some might say the prime challenge - of optimising future workloads on multicore processors will be dynamically distributing work across the many processing resources. AMD is looking to improve JVM management of its multicore chips, Pollan said.

For example, he indicated that AMD might direct garbage collection to specific processor cores and offload array-intensive processing work to the graphics processing unit (GPU).

"Offloading graphics to the GPU is a natural path after [AMD's] ATI acquisition," he said.

Pollan said AMD's JVM research on leveraging IBS might not reach production for years, but that the company will offer short-term performance engineering optimisations for its Shanghai chips to the OpenJDK community. µ

L'Inq
SD Times