Last week we hosted a server industry analyst event at the AMD campus in Austin.  The industry analysts are those sharp people that follow the server market’s every move and consult with many of the largest companies about IT strategies and technology while also publishing research and market trend data.  You’d know the names if you are in IT, it’s a who’s who of the smart folks.  And you’ll probably be hearing a lot of them weigh in publicly on our strategy and products once we launch.

Obviously the big topic was the new AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series platforms that will be launching very soon.  We had plenty of party favors – everyone walked home with a new 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor, code name “Magny-Cours”.  Of course, it was an NDA event, so we really can’t divulge all the details just yet. I can tell you we did see some cool new servers so expect some nice videos on YouTube once the products launch.

For this year’s event, we had stronger participation from our industry partners than ever before, showing the strength of support for AMD’s server platforms.  With three OEM partners here, talking to the analysts and showing off their products, it was clear that AMD’s strategy is resonating with our OEM partners, who are our connection to the IT end users.

And we also ran some demos to show why we are excited about our upcoming platforms:

Virtualization – We demonstrated Microsoft Hyper-V running on two different servers, one based on a Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Barcelona” (circa 2007) and a brand new “Magny-Cours”-based system.  We moved the virtual machine back and forth between the two systems without having to shut it down.  While that might not sound like a wild trick, we did it with FULL functionality of the VM.  We didn’t have to “dumb down” the VM on the new system so that we could move it to the older system.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, some other companies might have problems moving a 2010 VM to a 2007 server without limiting the VM features. (For example, in order to move a virtual machine from an Intel  “Nehalem”-based system to a “Harpertown” [or earlier] platform, the customer must not enable nested paging in the “Nehalem” virtual machine, which can reduce the overall performance of the VM.)  And since the server market seems to be offering the possibility of refreshes this year for the first time in a long time, we think this could be pretty important to a data center manager.

Performance – We had a server running the STREAM benchmark to show the performance advantage of that extra channel of memory.  We can tell you now that one of the key advantages of our platform will be the 33% advantage in memory channels over “Nehalem.”  And based on media reports, that’s an advantage we also expect when compared to the upcoming Intel processor codenamed “Westmere.”

As applications demand more and more data, having that fourth channel makes a huge difference in throughput.

Power – You might expect that doubling the cores in our new platforms would mean doubling the power, but you will be happy to know that’s not the case. We demonstrated a benchmark running on two servers, one based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Istanbul,” and one 12-core “Magny-Cours”-based platform.  You would have seen that the power consumption for the two is about the same at each utilization level.  However, there is one area where there was a big difference – at idle.  The “Magny-Cours”-based platform was actually lower!

Three days, more than a few meetings and slide decks, and a lot of upbeat conversation about the server market.   By all accounts it was a major success.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing 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.