AMD claims no premium for four-way chips • The Register
With Intel finally on par with Advanced Micro Devices in terms of CPU performance, memory bandwidth and basic server architecture, AMD is left to keep even or slightly ahead on performance and compete aggressively on price.
And with the launch of the «Magny-Cours» Opteron 6100 processors today, which make use of AMD’s own chipsets to make server platforms, AMD is intent on hitting Intel in the bottom line, and maybe market share, as it prices the Opteron 6100s lower than many might have expected. Particularly AMD shareholders.
But AMD has little choice but to lower prices because with the rounding out of the Xeon product line — the «Westmere-EP» Xeon 5600s announced two weeks ago and the «Nehalem-EX» Xeon 7500s due tomorrow — Intel will have chip lines with lots of cores and memory bandwidth with which to compete on feeds and speeds against whatever AMD has.
The Nehalem-EX chips will sport eight cores plus HyperThreading, Intel’s implementation of simultaneous multithreading. It will have integrated DDR3 memory controllers on the chip and use Intel’s homage to AMD’s HyperTransport interconnect, called QuickPath Interconnect, to make servers with four, eight, or perhaps more sockets.
The Xeon 5500s that debuted almost precisely a year ago were Intel’s first processors aimed at two-socket machines that deployed QPI and offered between three and four times the memory bandwidth of that stale old frontside bus architecture.
The Xeon 5500 and the new Xeon 5600s, the latter of which come in variants with four or six cores, make use the «Tylersburg» 5520 chipset, while the Nehalem-EX and quad-core «Tukwila» Itanium 9300s (announced in early February) use the «Boxboro» chipset that Intel is only now putting into the field. Intel has three distinct server processors using two distinct chipsets.
AMD, by contrast, is trying to chop up the market in a slightly different way, and perhaps cover the needs of server makers better in the process. The exact specs of the SR5600 series chipsets used with the Opteron 6100s and the future «Lisbon» Opteron 4100s (for entry servers) have not been divulged yet, but they are probably very similar to the chipsets AMD announced last September to work with the «Istanbul» six-core Opterons.
The chipset includes the SR5690, SR5670, SR5650 I/O hubs (which does ‘IOMMU’ I/O virtualization technology as well as reaching out to PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral slots) paired with the SP5100 southbridge, which links to USB and SATA ports and provides links to legacy PCI slots of mobo makers want to add them in.
The three different I/O hubs, as El Reg explained last summer, different in how many PCI-Express engines are on the chip, how many PCI-Express lanes they deliver, and how much juice the I/O hub burns. The SR5600 is a single chipset with three different dials, unlike Intel’s Tylersburg and Boxboro, which are very different animals.
Ditto for the Opteron 4100 chips that will come out in the second quarter and the Opteron 6100s coming out today. The Opteron 4100 is a tweaked Istanbul core that has its on-chip memory controller switched to DDR3 memory and that has an extra HT3 port so each processor in a four-socket complex can talk directly to the others. It fits into a modified Rev F 1,207-pin socket. The Opteron 6100 is basically two Opteron 4100s in a single package, plugging into a new 1,944-pin G34 socket.
The older Opterons had two memory channels per socket, as the Opteron 4100s will have as well, while the Opteron 6100s will have four channels per socket, offering lots of memory expansion. Servers with one and two sockets using the AMD SR5600 chipsets and the Opteron 4100 processors will compete with the low-end of the Xeon 5600 2P market and any aspirations Intel might have for single-socket boxes based on crimped Xeon 3600s or Core i5/i7 processors from desktops.
The Opteron 6100s will compete with the high-end of the Xeon 5600s in the 2P space and also take the fight on up to the 4P space. But, AMD’s chipsets and the chips themselves are really all the same. It is really a game of packaging some components in the stack up in different ways to target different markets.
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Microway Introduces New 8- and 12-Core AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processor-Based WhisperStations, Servers and Infiniband Clusters
Kingston, MA – March 29, 2010 –
Microway announces its most powerful AMD Opteron™ processor-based Navion™ platforms with the new 8- and 12-Core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors. The AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors provide significant performance enhancements for HPC applications. With new four-way server pricing comparable to traditional two socket systems, Navion four socket SMP servers provide up to 48 cores, 512 GB memory and multiple 3.5” drives in 1U or 4U configurations. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform more than doubles the memory bandwidth and provides 1.3x the I/O bandwidth of previous generation 2P and 4P servers, helping research institutions, enterprises and life sciences companies complete complex jobs with greater throughput and exceptional ROI.
Technical features of the AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processors include:
- 12 physical cores with next-generation Direct Connect Architecture 2.0
- Four memory channels per processor each supporting up to DDR3-1333
- Four HyperTransport™ 3.0 (HT3) links per processor to increase I/O performance
- STREAM memory bandwidth up to and exceeding 100GB/second
- AMD-V™ to enhance and accelerate software-based virtualization, helping run more virtual machines with less overhead
- New AMD-P™ power efficiency features including C1E Power State and Cool Speed technology designed to lower power costs
- New reliability-availability-security (RAS) features help reduce downtime and keep applications online
Navion 1U Twin servers include two dual-processor compute nodes with 48 total cores in 1U. Effectively doubling rack capacity, each motherboard features two 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processors, up to 256GB of DDR3 memory, InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet, robust cooling, and up to two hard drives. This packaging achieves a density of 1920 cores in a standard CoolRack 42U cabinet. Customers with compute-intensive applications including DSP, CFD and FEA, as well as high-performance database and enterprise-class applications choose Navion clusters for exceptional performance and power/space efficiency.
WhisperStation™– Microway’s ultra-quiet workstation — also provides improved performance with one or two 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors and up to four dual-width ATI RadeonT™ HD 5870 GPUs. WhisperStation configurations have been “quietized” by employing noise-reducing technologies and are available running many flavors of Linux® or Microsoft® Windows® 7.
“With four HyperTransport 3.0 links per socket, the latest AMD Opteron processors reduce inter-processor communication overhead, thereby helping to improve CPU and memory communication speeds. Both help contribute to the Microway’s highest SMP performance to date,” commented Stephen Fried, CTO of Microway. “Programs that we expect to dramatically benefit include floating point intensive computations like FFTs, which have high data re-use rates and SMP applications that make frequent calls, including transaction-based business applications. ”
“AMD and Microway share a vision where exceptional SMP performance and power efficiency must go hand-in-hand without compromising on overall feature set,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD. “In order to meet the needs of the high-performance computing environment, the AMD Opteron 6100 Series Processor delivers the right balance of scalability and efficiency for HPC customers.”
Microway’s HPC Clusters feature integrated advanced manageability and energy conserving features that have been refined over years of development and hundreds of real-world cluster deployments. Paired with Microway’s energy efficient designs, 80PLUS certified power supplies, and other technologies, Microway systems deliver superior green performance. In addition, the Microway-designed 1U CoolFlow™ chassis and 4U RuggedRack™ feature proprietary Across-the-Board™ enhanced cooling. Microway systems achieve operating temperatures that are consistently lower than industry guidelines.
Microway’s Cluster Management System (MCMS™) hardware/software solution features IPMI or NodeWatch™ integration for remote cluster monitoring and control. It is available on all Navion servers.
Complete AMD Opteron product descriptions can be found at https://www.microway.com/opteron.html.
About Microway, Inc.
Incorporated in 1982, Microway is a major vendor in the High Performance Computing market, designing state-of-the-art, high-end Linux clusters, servers, and data storage solutions. Users worldwide pushing the limits of technology choose us for solutions. Microway is a Premier AMD Fusion Partner, Mellanox Partner, Novell Gold Partner and Microsoft Direct OEM for Windows Server HPC License. Classified as a small business, woman owned and operated, Microway’s GSA Contract Number is GS-35F-0431N. For more information and a subscription to Microway’s online technical newsletter, please visit www.microway.com.
FasTree, Microway, InfiniScope, MPI Link-Checker, Navion, NodeWatch, NumberSmasher, OctoPuter, Quadputer, and WhisperStation are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microway, Inc.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, ATI, the ATI logo, AMD Opteron, FireStream, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used under License to the Khronos Group Inc.
AMD Opteron 6100 Series 6134 specifications, video review, reviews
General characteristics
*
| line | AMD Opteron |
| SOKKET | G34 |
| Unloven factor | NO |
Nucleus
*
| Integrated graphics core | No |
| Core | Magny-Cours |
| Process technology | 45 nm |
| Number of cores | 8 |
Frequency
*
| Tire frequency | HT | |
| Maximum memory bandwidth | 42. |
|
| Voltage on the nucleus | 1.3 B | |
| Multiplication | 2300 MHz |
Cache
*
| Cache volume L1 | 128 KB |
| Cache volume L2 | 4 096 KB |
| Cache L3 | 12 288 KB |
9002
Instructions
*
| SSE2 | There is |
| SSE4 | |
| HT | NO | 3DNOW 9000 3DNOW0007 | Yes |
| SSE3 | Yes |
Instruction sets
*
| NX BIT | is |
| Virtualization Technology | There is |
| AMD64/EM64T 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9002 9001 9000 9002 9002 9000 9002 9000 9002 9001 *
|