It’s a cloudy afternoon here in London, which is great because yesterday I was soaked while trying to see customers.  Clouds trump rain any day in my book.  A little known fact (outside of this country) is that the city of London is actually 2 cities, the City of London and the City of Westminster.

For London, “the the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is very true, especially when morning hits and the tube traffic swells the population of the city.

For AMD, our new server platform, the combination of AMD Opteron^TM processors and the new AMD chipsets show that the whole is larger than the sum of the individual parts as well.

AMD introduced 3 new chipsets this week, the SR5690, SR5670 and SR5650. And just like the different neighborhoods here in London, each has their own unique characteristics, yet each shares a lot in common with each other.  They are all built around the same silicon, with the same socket, same programming interface and same drivers.  Sound familiar?  But they have different numbers of PCI Express® lanes, different power consumption and different pricing, allowing our partners to customize their platforms around these different offerings.

And just like the swelling tube traffic this morning, these new chipsets have 2 features to help the system handle large amounts of traffic. They feature HyperTransport^TM 3 Technology allowing for high speed interconnection between the processors and the I/O devices.  In addition, once you get to those devices, you’ll find that our support for the new PCI Express® Gen 2 technology allows for high speed peripherals, like Quad Data Rate Infiniband, to be included in the servers.  If you are in an HPC environment or other clustering environment, having a high performance and low latency interconnect can really swing performance in the right direction.

And if you are into virtualization, these chipset provide the hardware support for I/O Virtualization, an emerging virtualization technology for increased performance and security. If you want to get a peak at these chipsets in action – check out the AMD Virtualization blog “AMD Showcases Virtualization Innovation at VMworld Conference” for recap of the demos we did at VMworld.

These new platforms will also include a new platform specification from AMD called “Kroner.” Kroner is a nod to those in the cloud computing space who are looking for ultra-high levels of power efficiency.  Optimized around best practices in power efficiency, the first Kroner platform, the Tyan S8208 is a single 1U system with two “twin” Kroner boards, able to deliver that impressive performance while only “sipping” the power at the wall. After hearing a customer tell me that they have a 4KW limit for their racks and can only put 10 servers in each, a platform like Kroner can go a long way towards helping optimize space in the data center.

With these new introductions, AMD is moving much more towards a platform company and not just a supplier of microprocessors – this was a key driver for the acquisition of ATI. We’ve seen the fruits of that on the client side, and now we are seeing it on the server side. Customers live the idea of an integrated platform with processor and chipset from the same company because that allows for much tighter integration of technology.  Just like London and Westminster.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.