I bought my first processor in a PC back in 1987.  12MHz.  Yes, and that was considered “fast.”  Back then, I worried about 2 things: performance and price.  I could have splurged and bought the 16MHz processor, but 12MHz seemed like the best balance for me at the time.

23 years, and a lot less hair later, I’m in the same boat.  I don’t buy many processors these days, but the process really hasn’t changed.  Today in the IT world, there are not 2 variables, there are 3: performance, price and power.

Those of us in the cubes here get really excited about a lot of things.  When our propellers start spinning, we get all fired up about the features of the processors.  But in reality, when you commit your scarce budget dollars to new servers, what do you look at?  You look at performance, price and power.

How can I prove this?  A minority of our processor sales are the top bin processors.  These are the fastest, most expensive and most power hungry.  And most applications don’t need that kind of horsepower.

This is because the balance of price/performance/power tells you that a bit further down the stack is your sweet spot.  I’ve talked to the folks who do buy those top speed processors. They run trading applications where a half second can be thousands of dollars in profit.  But for the majority of workloads, everyone wants to look elsewhere in order to maximize their budget.  We understand this, and at times, it feels like only we understand this.

When you look at our existing AMD Opteron™ processors as well as our upcoming new products (the 8- and 12-core processors codenamed “Magny-Cours”), you see two big themes: we don’t compromise on features and we are going to deliver the feature customers care most about:  value.

As you look at our products, you’ll see that as you move down the stack, from those fastest processors that everyone lusts after (but few buy) down to the value-priced processors, you’ll see the same set of features.  You won’t see AMD artificially limiting the capabilities or punishing a focus on low power.  Scaling back the features for marketing purposes is really not a very appetizing prospect for us. We believe that you should have the full set of features, no matter where you buy in the stack.

You won’t see us scale back the memory speeds. You won’t see us scale back the I/O speeds. You won’t see us pull features.  That is not our way to bring products to market.

You will see our processors vary in price based on core count and clock speed.  Beyond that, if you see a feature, like our AMD-Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology features or our AMD-P power features, expect them across the whole stack. You won’t see us pull a feature that you count on, and you really won’t see us pull features that could impact software images across different servers. Can every processor company in the x86 server business claim this?

At AMD, we believe you should buy the capacity you need at the price that makes sense – and get everything you paid for – no surprises. That is our commitment to you, so make sure your next processor isn’t artificially limited.

Yeah, that nanometer thing; let’s talk about what you really want.  There are a lot of technologies being tossed around these days.  Nanometers, High-K metal gates, immersion lithography.  They sound pretty high tech.  They are and they’re cool, but they don’t impact what you really care about:  that holy trinity of processor value criteria: performance, price and power.

It’s funny to think that some talk about manufacturing processes driving down costs, but when you compare price stacks, you see an amazing similarity over the years.  Where are those savings going? Fact is, manufacturing process improvements do help drive down costs – for the manufacturer.  We think cost savings belong in your pocket, and you’ll see why soon enough.

Let’s not go down the path of saying “technology X will lead to lower power.”  Plug in the server and decide for yourself.  Don’t think that something is going to lead to lower prices, instead, take a look at the bill. That is the best way to know for sure.

It may seem odd to have a marketing guy tell you not to fall for marketing, but at the end of the day, you’re going to buy the best product that meets your criteria.  And for the majority of applications, those criteria are price, performance and power.

Based on that, I am pretty confident that the best choice is going to be the new AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series processors because we designed them with you in mind.

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.