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.

This week, Fusion-io, a leading provider of enterprise-class solid state technology, announced a major milestone.  You may already be familiar with the ProLiant DL785, the 8-processor powerhouse server from HP, which features eight AMD Opteron™ processors. Fusion-io reports it was able to pump out an astonishing performance level, more than 1 million IOPS using the fio benchmark. They also claim sustained throughput was over 9GB, or roughly the capacity of two DVDs, per second.

In the past, when you talked about the million IOPS performance level, you were always talking about mainframe-class systems.  Today, we are talking about industry-standard x86 servers.

The HP DL875 takes the AMD Direct Connect architecture to new levels, providing the high end systems expertise to bring enterprise-class database and virtualization to x86 levels of value. With 8 processors and up 512GB of memory, this system provides the scalability and capacity for even the most demanding workloads.

Fusion-io uses NAND flash memory in PCI Express slots to help bring data as close to the processors as possible, helping reduce latency and helping drive up the IO throughput per second.  HP also utilizes the Fusion-io technology in its BladeSystem products through a product called the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator. Each BladeSystem server can support 2 or 3 of these IO accelerator cards to help drive greater performance while also helping hold power consumption down.

Yes, power consumption.  And before you start thinking that power consumption and 8 processor servers don’t generally correlate well, keep in mind that the larger the server footprint is, the more energy efficiency comes into play, helping hold down the power budget for the rack.

So what does this mean to you?  Several things.

As a Fusion-io customer it means that you can utilize state of the art solid state technology to break through the traditional system bottlenecks and reach entirely new levels of I/O throughput.

As an HP customer it means that you have platforms that can handle your most demanding enterprise applications.  And you can be confident that the engineering know-how that helped reach this unprecedented level of performance in an 8P system also helps drive outstanding levels of performance in the ProLiant BladeSystems as well.

As an AMD customer, you know it means that the AMD Direct Connect architecture is scalable enough to handle any of your workloads with exception I/O throughput through our use of the industry-standard HyperTransport™ technology.

And, as a customer or Fusion-io, HP and AMD, you can smile, confident in knowing that the combination of these potent technologies and platforms is delivering just what you need to solve today’s business challenges.

You’ve got a reason to smile, or, more accurately, a million reasons to smile.

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.

The iPod Classic has a feature called “Genius” that takes any song and creates a playlist of 24 additional songs that are similar to the one that you started with.  It’s pretty scary how often it is dead on in selecting the best adjacent music.  Sometimes its downright creepy, choosing “That Was Another Country” by the Innocence Mission when I was strolling down the streets of Kowloon one evening or the time it chose something from “Cheap Trick, Live at Budokan” on a flight to Tokyo. (Yes, I grew up in Chicago in the late 70′s; I’m not apologizing for that.)   I am going to assume that it was pure coincidence and not some nefarious GPS-enabled trick being played on me.

When we bring out our Istanbul processor, expected for release in the second half of this year, we plan to introduce a new feature called “HT Assist” that can give you much better throughput over the HyperTransport^TM technology connections by reducing the amount of traffic generated by the processors in seeking the shortest path to data that they need.

One of the best analogies that I have heard about this was that it is like a rifle shot versus a shotgun blast.

Processors in a system are always looking for the shortest distance to the data that they need.  The fastest location is always their own cache. After that, the caches of the other processors is the next logical location, before moving on to the memory, or, hopefully not, the hard drives. Like a set of concentric circles, each data location is higher in latency as you move away from your own local data set.

Processors spend time sending out probes to ask if other processors have the data they need in their cache.  But you have to ask every processor and each processor has multiple cores and multiple caches.  Yep, you guessed it – shotgun blast.  It’s like shouting our “Hey, anybody have that file I need” in a crowded office.  When one person does it, it can be disturbing, but when everyone does it, it gets really annoying.

HT Assist tracks data in caches and helps direct the processor directly to the data in the other processors’ caches. The rifle shot instead of the shotgun blast.

So, how does this help you?  Well, by reducing the amount of bus traffic, we expect to see servers run more efficiently and scale more linearly as application growth increases.  And improving server efficiency can help in many ways, such as getting the job done sooner, which can allow those hardworking CPUs to relax and reduce power draw for a bit, helping to keep your data center cooler.

And THAT is genius.

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.