AMD has announced the Opteron 6100 Series processor family, which will address rising demand for low-power, balanced systems for SMBs and increased performance-per-dollar-per-watt for enterprise and public sector environments.
A little over a year ago the AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform was released and a number of AMD partners (SGI, Cray, Acer, HP and Dell) followed with their own announcements of newly released AMD-powered systems. Today AMD introduces five new processors to the 6000 Opteron family with the 6132, 6140, 6166, 6176 and 6180 processors. The new 8 and 12 core chips are geared toward specific workloads, with three 12-core models for highly scalable applications and two 8-core models for more clock-speed intensive applications. A new 4100 series processor is also being released for general IT workloads and boasts the lowest power per core server processor.
HE and SE models
Two new HE processors are intended for those environments with demand for highly scalable, power-efficient systems. With a 65 watt power rating, the 12 core, 1.8GHz 6166 HE model and 8 core, 2.2GHz 6132 HE model are designed for web serving, virtualization and cloud computing workloads. The new 6180 SE 2.5GHz 12-core processor targets the HPC market, or financial services and database workloads. The new processors are socket-compatible with the AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform, as will be the upcoming 16-core 'Bulldozer'-based Opteron processors.
Performance and Value Benchmarks
With a greater core count and memory scalability AMD has scored some SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) and TPC benchmarks that demonstrate the Opteron delivers. In the SPECint_rate2006 benchmark the AMD 6180 had a better server throughput performance than a rival Intel chip for both integer and floating point calculations. For database value, the AMD 6176 SE Opteron logged a better result for TPC-C (online transaction processing benchmark) and TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support benchmark).
HPC Market
The High Performance Computing market has been a focus for AMD as they push their processor architecture forward and work closely with key vendors such as SGI and Cray. AMD has their technology at work in 57 of the Top500 supercomputers in the world (24 of the top 50), including the number two Jaguar that has 224,162 AMD Opteron cores.
Fast-paced 2011
It has been hinted that the AMD 16-core Interlagos chip with the new Bulldozer architecture could be released sooner than expected. At last fall's Supercomputing 2010 conference HPCwire named Interlagos 'Top New Product to Watch' for HPC. Interlagos contains a 'Flex FP', or flexible floating point unit that sets it apart from Intel and is sure to be of value to the HPC community. Flex FP allows for two 128-bit commands to be executed simultaneously, or one 128-bit and one 256-bit command.
InfoWorld recently named the AMD Opteron Magny-Cours the 2011 Technology of the Year.
Server Announcements Coming
AMD partners Acer, Dell, and HP will be launching new or refreshed AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform-based systems shortly, powered by the new 12 and 8-core Opteron processors.
