Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is adding a new, low-power Opteron processor to its Shanghai line road map and plans to release the chip in the second quarter of the year.
AMD said the need for lower-power chips is being driven, in part, by the rise of cloud computing centers, the massive data centers being built by the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. to deliver computing services.
However, AMD isn’t saying just yet how much power usage it can cut in the upcoming 45-nanometer, quad-core chip line below the 55 watts used by its low-power processor released today. AMD revealed its plans for the fourth chip as part of the release of two new processors.
In November, AMD released the first in its line of 45nm, quad-core Opterons, a 75-watt version with speeds of up to 2.7-GHz that makes up the bulk of sales in the Shanghai line.
Today, it followed that processor with two more: a 105-watt, 2.8-GHz chip designed for high-performance and large database users, and the 55-watt version, which offers speeds of up to 2.3 GHz. That latter processor may appeal to cloud-centric facilities and large hosting data centers.
These chips succeed similar offerings in the 65nm Barcelona line of processors.
The decision to add the fourth chip to the line follows AMD’s announcement last fall that Microsoft would use its Opteron chip for its cloud computing initiative, the company’s Windows Azure Compute Service.
AMD isn’t alone in looking to diversify its chip line to address escalating heating and cooling problems in data centers. Rival Intel, for instance, last year released a 50-watt Xeon chip.
In total, AMD is releasing seven chips with varying capabilities and prices; two in the 105-watt line priced at $1,165 and $2,649, and seven in the 55-watt line with speeds ranging from 2.1 GHz to 2.3 GHz. Prices for the 55-watt chips range from $316 to $1,514.
AMD said the new chips are available now on servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Rackable Systems Inc. Servers using these chips will be available this quarter from other vendors, including Dell Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.
At one time, a low-power chip with lower clock speeds would have gotten mostly niche adoption. But this niche is growing. Cloud computing is really a high-growth segment, said Steve Demski, a senior product manager at AMD. As a result, the chip maker is expecting demand for low-power chips to increase.
Lower power usage, combined with a virtualization-optimized processor, fits cloud-computing environments looking to save as much on energy consumption as possible, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif.
Source: ComputerWorld.com
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