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AMD rolls out lower-power Opterons
AMD IS CELEBRATING the sixth anniversary of its first Opteron processor launch by announcing some brand spanking new, low-power, 40-watt, virtualisation-primed Opteron EEs aimed at the credit crunched enterprise space.
The firm's new offerings will now take up their spot as AMD's lowest-power server chips, bumping the 55-watt Opteron HE off its perch with its lower 40-watt thermal envelope.
The low, low power 45nm quad-core chip boasts clock speeds of 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, with the firm trying to convince all those dazed by the bright light of Nehalem that it's not just about raw performance, but efficiency and being able to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of one's chips.
Energy efficiency has been a favourite catchphrase in the IT industry for a while now, but AMD is really taking it to a new PR and marketing level, hoping to convince enterprises that the EE's lesser price tag and energy savings will save them cash compared to the all powerful Nehalem beast.
Despite going as low as it can go voltage wise, AMD is not skimping on chip features, with the same familiar Direct Connect integrated memory controller, the ability to scale without blowing power consumption or thermal output through the roof, and of course all the bits and bobs needed for virtualisation.
Power wise, Smart Fetch purportedly puts idle processing cores to sleep whilst PowerCap controls a processor's speed and voltage and CoolCore ensures power isn't flowing to bits of the processor which don't need it.
All in all, AMD is announcing no less than twelve new souped-up Shanghai chips including six Opteron 2300s for two-socket servers and six Opteron 8300s for four-socket and up servers.
Also, while the latest offerings may not be able to beat Nehalem at the bench(marking), Intel would do well to remember it was AMD that came up with much of the good stuff which makes Xeon 5500s such winners. And although it's true that AMD's latest offerings don't have Intel innovations like Turbo Boost and HyperThreading, neither does Intel's low-end Nehalem chip, which is still more expensive than AMD's comparable Opteron.
If AMD keeps its head down and its nose to the grindstone, Intel had better not relax and lie back on its laurels for too long.
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imagine if u had a few hundred of those in your desktop _
we really don't need faster processors, we need more intelligent ones. we need to rewrite every piece of code from the ground up to expect a bunch of lower powered processors to break up work chunks to. just look at the video card i say. or look here: http://www.physorg.com/news159623453.html
New 167-processor chip is super-fast, ultra energy-efficient
April 22nd, 2009
A new, extremely energy-efficient processor chip that provides breakthrough speeds for a variety of computing tasks has been designed by a group at the University of California, Davis. The chip, dubbed AsAP, is ultra-small, fully reprogrammable and highly configurable, so it can be widely adapted to a number of applications.
The chip is designed for digital signal processing. While not the principal kind of processor chip used in desktop computers, digital signal processing chips are found in a myriad of everyday and specialized devices such as cell phones, MP3 music players, video equipment, anti-lock brakes and ultrasound and MRI medical imaging machines.
Maximum clock speed for the 167-processor AsAP is 1.2 gigahertz (GHz), but at slower speeds its energy efficiency soars. Twelve chips working together could perform more than half-a-trillion operations per second (.52 Tera-ops/sec) while using less power than a 7-watt light bulb.
"A battery powering this chip will typically last from several times to 75 times longer than it would under the same workload when powering some of the common commercially available digital signal processing chips," said Bevan Baas, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and leader of the design team. "At the same time, with our targeted applications, we're getting several times to 10 times better speed than what is currently available — all with a much smaller chip. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest clock-rate processor chip designed at any university."
Built with what's known as 65 nanometer CMOS technology, the AsAP measures only about one-fifth of an inch (less than 6 mm) on a side. It could be made even smaller if the number of processors were reduced, which could make it suitable for applications like retinal implants and hearing aids that require extreme miniaturization, Baas said. Also, the small size keeps production costs low: a rule of thumb in the industry is that for every doubling of size, manufacturing costs per chip will be much more than twice as high.
Although the chip is built with industry-standard fabrication technology and design tools, it embodies a number of novel architectural and circuit features, Baas explained. Throughout the design process, his group took energy efficiency and high speed into consideration. "These were two of our main objectives, which we never gave up on during the planning stages. And all those choices added up," he said.
Multi-processor chips like the AsAP are part of a growing trend in chip design. With the need for increasing speed driving the industry, designing high-speed processor chips has become a daunting task due to several factors, including complexity of design, but also because the faster a processor works, the more it heats up. In a multi-processor chip, the work load is spread over many processors working in parallel, so heating and energy consumption can be kept in check.
Baas' group has written a number of software applications for the chip, which has been fabricated by the international electronics company STMicrotronics. It took one student just three months to write "a fully compliant Wi-Fi transmitter," Baas said. They have also written a Wi-Fi receiver and several complex components of an H.264 video encoder. After testing the chip extensively, it has worked without a glitch, Baas added.
The group made a brief announcement about the chip in June 2008 at the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in Honolulu, and details of its design have just been published in the April issue of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
"The paper makes key ideas behind the design available to industry and university researchers," Baas said. "Now our group plans to continue developing software and programming tools for the chip while exploring ideas for the next generation."
Source: University of California - Davis
I don't think anyone wanted NVidia server chipsets to begin with :O
The latest nVidia chipset drivers info from nVidia's website:
Version 9.24
Release Date: October 11, 2007
Operating System: Windows Server 2003
Does anyone really want to trust their server environment to chipset drivers from nVidia for AMD chips now that they are enemies?
I too hope AMD gets its server chipsets out soon, the sooner the better... As far as the nForce Professional chipsets go, they've been rock solid, for me anyway, i have 5 servers running the nForce 3600+3050 and 1 running nForce 2200 chipsets, they've served me well.
The drivers you refer to are for the nForce 2200 professional chipset, which is a dated chipset, i wouldnt expect too much development on an older platform.
and seriously, nVidia isnt the only option available for Opteron, Broadcom has their serverworks HT 1000/2000 Opteron chipsets as well...
Who wants Opteron chips when one has to use nVidia chipsets? nVidia hasn't updated their Windows 2003 server chipset drivers for AMD chips since before AMD aquired ATI, and stability problems are abundant in numerous forums . . . Enemies . . .
I hope AMD releases their new chipsets soon . . .