AMD Challenges Intel Supremacy

According to Brent Kerbey, senior product marketing manager for AMD, the 6100 series will also feature four memory channels, which will help balance the systems based on making sure that all 12 core processors have enough access to memory.

With the launch of the 6100 series, AMD is also finally adding support for DDR3 memory, which along with its additional memory channels are primary elements of the company’s Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 platform.

Although 6100 series processors will be used in a range of systems, Kerbey said AMD expects to see a resurgence of interest in four-socket servers now that IT organizations will be able to effectively buy a balanced system that evenly distributes processing across systems that have more cores and more memory that anything Intel can currently offer.

Among the first vendors to make use of the 6100 series is Hewlett-Packard, which will is rolling out three Proliant G7 servers based on the new Opteron processors.

The new servers continue a trend under which the IT industry is seeing a raft of next-generation servers that add substantial amounts of processing power while actually reducing the amount of energy consumed. According to Dave Peterson, group manager for product marketing in HP’s Industry Standard Servers group, new processor architectures such as the Opteron 6100 series are allowing HP to deliver servers that can pay for themselves in as little as two months.

Peterson said HP is supporting both Intel and AMD processors in its server lineup because the processor architectures developed by both companies are sufficiently different enough to deliver different levels of performance based on how certain applications make use of multi-threaded processing.

Meanwhile, providers of high-performance systems are also enthused about the new Opteron 6100 series. According to company officials for Appro, a provider of high-performance systems, the Opteron 6100 series levels the playing field at the high end of the server market because AMD for the first time is supporting DDR3 memory, using more processors in essentially the same amount of physical space consumed by Intel systems. In environments where physical space is at a premium, the Opteron 6100 series creates a compelling new option, they said.

Appro’s new Hyper-Clusters and Xtreme-X series of two- and four-socket server offerings can now be configured with 50 percent more DIMMs and as many as 48 total cores accessing 100GB per second of bandwidth.

AMD also rolled out today a 4100 series of processors that consumes less energy, but only supports six to eight core processors.

Next year, AMD is also promising to deliver a 12- to 16-core implementation, code named Interlagos.