AMD emphasizes efficiency with Barcelona
By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- EDN, September 10, 2007
AMD has changed the way it designs processors, starting with a fixed power budget and building performance improvements around that.
The shift is largely due to the way that customers—particularly data centers—now buy servers. With cooling and power operating costs approaching the cost of the server hardware, many corporations have begun focusing on different buying criteria than in the past. Performance is one factor, but power savings are an ever-growing consideration.
Randy Allen, corporate VP in charge of AMD’s server and workstation productions division, said there are three considerations that companies make in buying server hardware—peak performance, performance per watt and performance per dollar. He said that performance per watt is the most difficult to measure, but the one that has become increasingly important in measuring return on investment.
“The traditional buying criterion has been peak performance,” he said. “People would buy at the highest peak performance they could or they would buy on performance per dollar…This emergence of performance per watt has been dramatic over the last two years.”
Making processors more efficient by keeping the power consumption static has required some complex innovations. Allen said Barcelona includes such innovations as dynamically controlling power between cores, among other things. He said that in the second half of next year, AMD will move its Opteron server chips to 45nm processes, adding larger cache and hypertransport inside the chip as well as DDR3 memory.
Like Intel, AMD is focusing heavily on virtualization to improve efficiency within data centers. With many data center servers operating at between 5 percent to 15 percent efficiency, virtualization offers a way to greatly improve usage of those processors. Hector Ruiz, AMD’s chairman and CEO, said that virtualization will likely cause a short-term drop-off in sales to data centers, but he believes that will be a one-time blip that will last no more than a year.
“Virtualization will open the door for more than you can do today,” Ruiz said. “People will learn how to use virtualization.”
Efficiency is likely to become a marketing tool for selling the new chips, as well. AMD officials contend the new Barcelona chips are more efficient than rival Intel's quad-core processors due to the memory structure on the chips. "They have an external memory controll that takes two times more power than ours," said Allen.
