Posts tagged with Broadcom chipset

A couple of weeks ago at a press event in Sunnyvale celebrating the sixth anniversary of the AMD Opteron processor launch in 2003, we provided details on Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 and our 2010 server platforms code-named “Maranello” and “San Marino”.

Both “Maranello” and “San Marino” will be “AMD on AMD” platforms, meaning they will leverage chipsets developed by AMD. Currently shipping AMD server platforms use chipsets from Nvidia and Broadcom. Both Nvidia and Broadcom will continue to support Socket F platforms through 2010, including upcoming systems based on our six-core “Istanbul” processors.

When asked at the press event about our relationship with Nvidia and Broadcom in the context of our server platforms, Vice President and General Manager of AMD Server Business Unit Pat Patla stated the following: “For 2010, moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time. We don’t expect to see new chipsets from NVIDIA or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010.”

Unfortunately, this led to some speculation that there were licensing issues between AMD and Nvidia. At no time did AMD offer any comment related to future server processor licensing agreements with Nvidia or any third-party chipset provider.

Dating to the ATI acquisition in 2006, the long-term AMD plan remains consolidating on our own chipsets for future server platforms. As such, it was a mutual business decision between AMD and our third-party server chipset providers that they would not develop chipsets for future AMD server platforms. This was a decision specific to the server business unit.

We are very excited about the opportunity to bring new platform-level innovations to the x86 server market later this year, starting with our “Fiorano” and “Kroner” platforms in the second half. Some of those new features include:

• IOMMU – Increased performance through enhanced I/O and improved security through hardware isolation of VMs
• HyperTransport 3 – Increased platform-level I/O bandwidth
• PCI Express Gen 2 – Optimized for Accelerated and Stream computing environments