AMD has unveiled its plans to release processors and platforms in 2010 and 2011. Unlike the markets for mobile and desktop platforms, the situation on the markets AMD servers and HPC is very good. Pre-term delivery of six-core processors AMD Opteron code-named Istanbul made it possible to create the fastest supercomputer in the world at the fourth quarter of 2009. It is called the Cray XT5-HE "Jaguar" and has 224,162 nucleus, providing performance in almost 1.76mln GFLOPS. Opteron EE made the whole world in a different way to look at cloud computing, six-core Opteron to offer excellent price / performance ratio in the server market, and chetyrehsoketnye Opteron 84xx processors are the undisputed champions in the world of processors, for chetyrehsoketnyh platforms.

Nevertheless, the position of AMD in the server market and HPC is under serious threat. Of the 500 largest supercomputers installed in 95 processors Intel "Nehalem-EP" Xeon 5500, that is, the HPC market is growing rapidly Star Intel after the Intel Xeon 5500. Processors Nehalem EX will soon be ready to attack the market chetyrehsoketnikov. And that's not all.

AMD has created a "cool" niche market with a 40W ACP (60W TDP) Opteron EE. These processors are bought directly from several thousand to create a productive and low-energy data centers. But only a few months ago, Intel also introduced the 45W Xeon L3426 with a frequency of 1.86GHz, which is based on the core Lynfield (socket LGA1156). Given that these AMD rather optimistic and TDP Intel is very pessimistic, 8-stream Quad 1.86GHz L3426 with price $ 284 in the batch of 1000 pieces makes six-core Opteron 1.8GHz 2419EE expensive ($ 989). The solution Intel is able to increase the frequency of a single core to 3.2GHz, becoming a really interesting option if the application is largely parallel. And in general the performance per core for Intel more.

While AMD may counter Intel greater number chder. Indeed, the six-core Opteron can keep pace with the Xeon 5500 in a number of applications. But Intel is preparing a slightly improved version of the six-core Xeon 5500 under the name Westmere-EP, which will be released in the first half of 2010. This processor will consume the same or less than the Xeon 5500. Its architecture is identical to the Nehalem EP except for 50% larger cache L3 (12Mb instead of 8MB) and support for special instructions AES.

AMD has made a historic step forward in September 2009 with the introduction of its own server chipsets. For the first time AMD has become a real supplier of server platforms, providing both the CPU and chipset. Previous server platform AMD has worked on the basis of chipset nForce 3600 Pro, developed by NVIDIA. From the standpoint of system administrators it was not very convenient solution. But now it's in the past, and AMD is fully responsible for their own server platform. Characteristics and Southbridge chipsets from AMD can be seen in the table.

At the moment the influence of "Fiorano" or chipsets SR56xx is negligible. Most manufacturers make server socket-based C32 and G34 and does not want to invest in server platform Socket-F. Now servers based on chipset AMD SR5690 only offer Tyan and Supermicro, focusing on the market for high performance computing systems.

In 2010, AMD is expected to slightly improve the current six-core Opteron "Istanbul", making them the following additions: "real" state of C1E, which reduces the idle power of each core, and support for DDR3. Theoretically, DDR3-1333 provides a throughput of up to 66% more, but in practice the tests showed an increase in the capacity of not more than 25% at the same delays. This means that the performance gain in most applications, the server will not be noticeable and only applications with very intensive use of high-performance computing to accelerate to 10-20%.

Intel plans to increase the performance of processors by 20-30%, while AMD processors are waiting only a slight increase. Thus, after some time, Intel will be making a significant advantage over the decisions of AMD. Nevertheless, AMD has found interesting ways to make their server platforms more interesting.

For example, AMD is going to produce cheaper chetyrehsoketnye server processors. Manufacturer uses the same building blocks for his 4-socket platform that for high platform, and calls it a G34. RAS features remain the same, and as a result, AMD can not fully compete with a platform Nehalem EX, in the case of RAS, but this is not a major problem, moreover, in most cases (98%) RAS-functions are not used in servers. To compete with 8-core and 16-stream Nehalem EX, AMD puts two DDR3 Istanbul together and connects them via HyperTransport, and calls it processor Opteron 6100 (socket G34). Server-based Opteron 6100 can come close in performance to the average Nehalem EX, but they are much cheaper to design and manufacture. The disadvantage is that the AMD version has only 12 DIMM slots per processor, and Nehalem EX has 16 DIMM slots per processor.

It seems that AMD will be difficult to gain the upper segment of the server market. Quad Nehalem 5500 already exceeds the six-core Opteron "Istanbul" by wide margin, 30-50%. Opteron 6100 is 50% more cores, but it is likely that the "original eight-" processors will be scaled slightly well than the version with two. In terms of virtualization, increased the number of DIMM slots are the strengths of Nehalem EX. At first glance it seems that AMD will be difficult to retain a share in this part of the server market.

When it comes to expensive servers, AMD starts to cheat. Most of the segment are servers with sixteen-core Opteron (2 socket on the 2x4 kernel), 8 channels and 24 memory slots, DIMM.Performance is likely to be "sufficiently close" to the servers Westmere EP, which can offer only six memory channels and 18 slots DIMM. Additional storage capacity and high throughput can do solutions on the Opteron 6100 attractive for HPC, while increasing the number of DIMM slots with competitive price well suited to virtualization.

The main segment servers with AMD had no choice but to reduce the price. We Opteron processor 4100 (“Lisbon", socket C32, Platform San Marino) have no chance against Westmere-EP on the same frequency, and therefore able to compete with the enemy only through lower prices. To increase performance per watt San Marino servers do not support processors SE 105 137Vt. This ensures that server vendors will not overdo it with the voltage regulators and power supply, which in turn reduces the overall power consumption of the server to 75W ACP.

At AMD, there are some successes in the segment of ultra-low power consumption. Platform Adelaide is an optimized low-power successor to the platform Kroner.All components of this system are designed for low power. It is noteworthy that the ACP processor Opteron 4100 EE decreased to very low 35W, less than 6W for each core.

AMD believes that these processors offer an excellent alternative to servers on the VIA Nano processor and Intel Atom. Instead of running a small site on a server Intel Atom, says AMD, providers will be more convenient to work with 6 websites in one container. Thus, each site will receive its own 6W nucleus, which is much more powerful than the best processor Intel Atom.

Platform AMD C32 and G34 will be able to expand by setting new processors Valencia and Interlagos, which is based on the core Bulldozer. Distinctive features of these processors:

• Two integer cluster to share the logic sampling and decoding, but have their own dedicated cache of commands and data.
• Clusters for integer calculations can not be divided between the threads: kernel for integer calculations act as Chip Multi Processing (CMP) processor.
• Additional kernels for integer calculations (planners, D-cache and pipes) are added only 5% of the area of the chip.
• L1 cache is similar to cache Barcelona / Shanghai (64Kb, not confirmed).
• Up to 4 processor cores share the L3-cache and the north bridge.
• Two processors Bulldozer (2 x 8 cores) for about 60-80% faster than Processor Core Opteron 6100 SPECInt_rate.

Processor Bulldozer AMD, it seems, finally has developed an aggressive processing core. Since the introduction of Intel Woodcrest 2006 Intel processors provide higher performance per core at integer calculations. Since such calculations determine the efficiency of 90-95% of server applications, it is very good.

Now Intel is preparing a very strong line of products for each market segment: large-scale eight-Nehalem EX for the "critical" of the upper segment, six-core Westmere-EP for the midrange and Lynfield Xeon segment with low power consumption. But AMD does not lag behind: it breaks all the rules of market segments and destroys some of the (artificial?) Border. This will lead to very interesting opportunities for buyers of servers in 2010.