AMD has worked to ensure optimization and/or support on many commonly used server operating systems. AMD is specifically targeting the High Performance Computing (HPC) segment, with over 500,000 Bulldozer cores already shipped to this market since September. The Opteron 6200 series was formerly codenamed Interlagos. It is scalable to 4 sockets supporting 16 Bulldozer cores each. The Opteron 4200 series was formerly codenamed Valencia. Opteron 6200 CPUs have quad memory channels, while the Opteron 4200 chips have dual channels. 1.35v low voltage memory and 1.25v ultra-low voltage memory is also supported, as are Load Reduced DIMMs (LRDIMMs).
The L1 cache is arranged as 16KB data per core and 64KB instruction per module, while the L2 cache is 1MB per core. Opteron 6200s have a shared 16MB of L3 cache per socket, while Opteron 4200s only have a shared 8MB per socket. The company believes that its lower total platform costs over Intel’s Xeon platforms impart a significant advantage. AMD thinks that it can gain significant market share by claiming the lowest x86 watts/core in the industry at 5.3W for Interlagos and 4.375W for Valencia. The new C6 power state reduces power consumption at idle by up to 46% over the previous generation by enabling core power gating When a core is halted, its context is exported to system memory and voltage is removed from the core.
The setbacks turned AMD into an also-ran in the market for chips that run corporate networks. AMD has priced its chips so that they will provide 55 percent more performance than Intel equivalents, Patla said.--Some of the new AMD chips will draw as little as 5 watts per processing core, making them ideal for that market, he said. Shares of AMD rose 0.3 percent to $5.97 at 10:14 a.m. in New York. The company’s last big hit in servers was Opteron, introduced in 2003, which helped AMD squeeze more profit from each chip. In 2005, AMD’s products began to approach Intel’s gross margins, which run as high as 67 percent. That’s when AMD’s fortunes reversed.
Intel, which dominates the server market with its x86 processor family, has taken a different approach to multicore chips called hyperthreading. Intel's E7 line of Xeon processors currently has as many as 10 cores each. The Opteron 6200 can automatically boost the clock speed of busy cores when others are idle, though, through a technology called Turbo Core. Another mechanism called TDP Power Cap lets administrators set maximum power consumption. The top-end 16-core 6282 SE runs at 2.6GHz and consumes a maximum of 140 watts.
Dropping cores to 12 gets 2.6GHz and 115W; going down to 8 cores lets the chip run at 3GHz at 115W; and the farthest extreme, the quad-core Opteron 6204 hits 3.3GHz at 115W. Except for the last model, the clock speed bumps up significantly with the Turbo Core approach. Among the notable customers of the new processor is Cray, which is building a mammoth supercomputer with the AMD 16-core processors. The Interlagos chips are accompanied by the "Valencia" models for servers with sockets for two processor sockets.
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