Those that follow this blog may recall that in 2011 AMD received the prestigious award for best parallel processing CPU in the “Technology of the Year” article from InfoWorld for our AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor.

When you are in the CPU business, and your world revolves around parallel processing (let’s face it, server customers crave more cores for their multithreaded applications), then this one is the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl of CPU technology. And with my New Orleans Saints poised to win their second Super Bowl this year (yes, that is where I am putting my money), then it is only fitting that the AMD Opteron processor repeats as well.

And it has.

InfoWorld has announced its 2012 “Technology of the Year” winners, and again, AMD picks up the award for our new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor.

This new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor builds on all of the great things its predecessor offered, including four memory channels, DDR-3 support and high core density while incorporating more cores and a new x86 core architecture.

The addition of more cores, now up to 16 total cores, brought us a processor that beats our older generation by up to 71% in database performance [1] in the TPC-C benchmark.

With support for faster DDR-3 memory, we delivered an additional 32% greater memory throughput in the STREAM memory benchmark [2].

And all of this comes in a power/thermal envelope that is consistent with the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors – as a matter of fact, nearly all of the servers that were launched with the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors have been refreshed to offer AMD Opteron 6200 series as well.

Oh, and if one award wasn’t enough, our friends over at Dell were also awarded Technology of the Year for their Dell PowerEdge R715 server which can run both our AMD Opteron 6100 Series or 6200 Series processors.

2012 looks like it is shaping up to be a great year with a major press win under our belt already, it is clear that the market is very impressed with our processors.  And we couldn’t be happier.

Oh, and, GEAUX SAINTS!!!

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

[2] Based on measurements in AMD labs as of December 2, 2011. 

Configuration Information:

2 x AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6176 in “Dinar” reference design kit, 32GB (8 x 4GB DDR3-1333) memory, SuSE Linux® Enterprise Server 11 SP1 64-bit

2 x AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6276 in “Dinar” reference design kit, 64GB (8 x 8GB DDR3-1600) memory, SuSE Linux® Enterprise Server 11 SP1 64-bit