AMD Processors Continue to Dominate Top500 Supercomputers

If you recall last year, the Jaguar Cray XT5 Supercomputer topped the list as the worlds fastest supercomputer utilizing six-core AMD Opteron processors. Six months later, AMD continues to hold the reigning spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer List announced just a few days ago at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Jaguar continues to be the world's highest performing system featuring nearly a quarter million cores. The Cray XT5 was improved nearly 70% last year and continues to process 1.75 petaflop per second, up from 1.04 in June 2009.

Additional Top 10 systems based on AMD technology are:

#3: Roadrunner - Los Alamos National Labratory: A hybrid system from IBM utilizing BladeCenter cluster technology in conjunction with AMD Opteron processors and has a processing speed of 1.042 petaflops per second.

#4: Kraken - University of Tennesse: A Cray XT5 system similar to Jaguar which peaks at .83 petaflops.

#7: Tianhe-1 - National SuperComputer Center, China: Another hybrid system using ATI Radeon graphics processors from AMD and has a processing speed of .56 petaflops per second.

The number of AMD technology-based Supercomputers on the TOP500 now stands at 51 with systems that can be found across the globe including in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway. AMD technology currently drives more than 4.2 Petaflops of computing power in the TOP10 alone which is used by universities and national labs to conduct research in engineering, finance, climate predictions, and energy efficient designs. In addition, Cray has recently announced plans for its next-generation Cray XE6 supercomputer which will be based on AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and have the ability to scale to more than 1 million cores.

“Our customers are selecting AMD platforms for supercomputing because they provide the cores, the memory, the power savings and clearly the performance that the world’s leading research institutions require for their ground-breaking work,” said John Fruehe, director, Server and Embedded product marketing at AMD. “AMD has been a leader in delivering the benefits of x86 and open source computing to the HPC community and it will be exciting to see what further advances the AMD Fusion™ family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) will bring.”

---

Looking for other Technology Rental information? Visit the Tech Travel Site Map for a variety of computer and technology rental ideas.

AMD - "Welcome to the World of 12 Cores"

AMD has kicked off this week by debuting its new "Magny-Cour" server platform series which includes the new Opteron 6100 8-core and 12-core processors. These are the world’s first 8- and 12-core x86 server processors and come with a host of new features including 4 memory channels, HyperTransport™ technology 3.0, a fourth HyperTransport technology link for better processor-to-processor communication in 4P servers, and new power management features that allow for increased performance when compared to previous generations. The chips themselves began shipping last month but AMD has waited until nearly the end of Quarter 1 to make them official so that Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) would be ready with Opteron 6100-powered machines.

The Opteron 6000 platform targets the 2P and 4P market and is aimed to be used for virtualization, database, and high performance computing applications. Apart from the new CPUs, the Opteron platform features the G34 socket and 5600 Series chipset with I/O virtualization capability, HyperTransport 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0. The Opteron 6100 processors are manufactured on 45nm technology and boast four HyperTransport links, a 4 channel integrated DDR3 memory controller, up to 12MB of L3 cache, and is up to 88% faster than the previous generation of processors.

In today's economic climate, AMD has decided to downplay maximum performance in favor of improved power consumption and a cheaper MSRP. Customers are simply looking for more, not less, in their IT dollar and AMD boasts maximum performance. When placed next to servers of comparable power, competitors fall short in pricing. Based on this graph, consumers are paying 42% more money for the honor of a slower processor. In the power consumption field, AMD clearly shows their efficiency by beating out an Intel 130W Thermal Power Design (TDP) part with their own 80W Average Power Consumpution (ACP) part in terms of performance. Effectively AMD has doubled the cores while staying in the same power and thermal range as previous generations.

In addition to AMD's aggressive 2P pricing, they have upped the value and stripped away the “4P tax.” Long gone are the days when customers are required to pay a premium in order to buy a processor capable of scaling up to 4 CPUs in a single platform. As of today, the 4P "tax" from AMD is effectively $0 but the same cannot be said for other competitors.

"As AMD has done before, we are again redefining the server market based on current customer requirements," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD. "The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform signals a new era of server value, significantly disrupts today’s server economics and provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for their real-world data center workloads."

The Opteron 6000 platform has already been adopted by HP, Dell, Acer Group, SGI and Cray with many more expected.

---

Looking for other Technology Rental information? Visit the Tech Travel Site Map for a variety of computer and technology rental ideas.