Posts tagged with Scalability
Faster Supercomputing Cats Fueled by Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processors
Posted by John Fruehe in 4:10 pm
Loading ...In the June 2009 TOP 500 list, the Oak Ridge National Labs’ “Jaguar” system was #2, edging close behind the “Roadrunner” cluster and was the first wholly x86 system to achieve a petaflop in performance. Of course, both utilize AMD Opteron processors to reach their record shattering performance.
However, this summer, Oak Ridge embarked on a project to increase their capacity and performance – an upgrade of the 37,000 processors in the cluster to Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.
Because of AMD’s consistent platform strategy, with processor commonality and common sockets, the task was remarkably simple. It took approximately 5 minutes per 8P server module to do the upgrade. (Watch the upgrade here.)
When we developed the Socket F (1207), we anticipated a long life for the socket. As a matter of fact, we anticipate that socket living through the end of 2010. Customers who have standardized on products based on those processors will probably want some consistency across their data centers. And customers that have built out capacity on those platforms might want to upgrade, something that is easy and painless for our customers. Contrast this with our competitor’s “tick tock” approach – which threatens a continual pace of disruption.
With this upgrade, “Jaguar” now takes a new spot in the TOP500 list. First. That is one fast cat – and it is purring along on AMD Opteron technology.
Researchers were quickly back online and with this additional performance they now have the ability to solve complex (frankly, mind-boggling) problems faster, in addition to tackling more projects, some that have previously been out of their reach.
To get an understanding of Oak Ridge National Labs’ scientific research and their take on the TOP500, take a look at this video.
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.
AMD Opteron Processor – Delivering True Value, Not Just Benchmarks
Posted by John Fruehe in 4:39 pm
(10 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)I left the office yesterday at 5:00, headed to the trail for my weekly ride. Because of the recent rain, we shifted to City Park, one of the most technical mountain bike trails in Austin. If you just looked at us and our bikes in the parking lot, you’d notice that the older guy with the borrowed bike (because I finally broke my frame after 4 years) would probably not fare well against better riders, younger riders or newer bikes.
But looks can be deceiving. While I didn’t have the flashy skills or the newest ride, I did have a dedication and a lack of technical problems that actually allowed me to finish the ride ahead of others. Sometimes the outcome isn’t always as obvious.
Too many people get caught up in the benchmarks and think that is the end of the story. Benchmarks can be important as an indicator, but they don’t tell the whole story. As a matter of fact, they really only tell a portion of PART of the story. In my opinion, making a decision based on benchmark alone is like buying a car because you like the color. That is great if all you care about is a red car, but so few of us really think that way in the real world.
One of the things that I have been telling customers is that they need to step out of the “socket” world and start thinking more about the work that needs to get done when assessing the platforms. Sometimes the answer is not obvious.
The non-obvious thread for today started this morning when I went to check out the latest review on AnandTech.com of the AMD Opteron processor vs. our competitor’s processor (which my colleague Margaret Lewis also discusses here). We sent them a review system recently and during their testing, they came up with some interesting comments.
Comparing a 2 socket Intel server to a 4 socket AMD server, you start to see that if you step outside of the raw performance area, there are plenty of other places to be looking, like threading and efficiency, not just clock speed. Here is what AnandTech had to say when comparing our six-core 2435 to a higher clock speed quad core:
“If your application scales well, two 2.6GHz Opteron 2435 will offer 15% better (and sometimes more) performance than a 2.9GHz Opteron 2389 with the same power consumption.”
More performance, at the same power envelope and lower clock speed. Not always the most obvious answer, but clearly a great choice for threaded applications. (And don’t think that applications will be less threaded in the future.) Memory is another area less than obvious. Here is what AnandTech had to say:
“Using relatively ‘old’ technology such as DDR2, the hex-core Opteron based servers are very affordable, especially if you compare them with similar Xeon servers.”
Yeah, I was the old guy on the trail, but that didn’t mean I was the last. I can think of a couple of younger guys finishing after me – so sometimes “newer” doesn’t me “better”. Again, not the obvious answer, but until the prices of DDR-3 come in line with DDR-2, this is our secret weapon. And in a tough economy, who doesn’t want to be smart with their IT budgets.
We have tremendous consistency, but people expect that. And they expect that all processors in the family will have the same features. That is obvious, right? Here’s how AnandTech saw it.
“If you chose the Xeon platform, you should be aware of the fact that Intel’s low end is much less interesting: the best Xeon 55xx CPUs have a clock speed between 2.26 and 2.93GHz. The low end models, the 5504 and 5506 are pretty crippled, with no Hyper-Threading, no Turbo Boost, and only half as much L3 cache (4MB). These crippled CPUs can keep up with the quad-core Opterons at about 2.5GHz, but they are the worst Xeons when you look at idle and full load power. The performance per Watt of the Xeon EE550x is pretty bad compared to the more expensive parts.”
You’ve heard me talk a lot about “no compromises” in our products, and this is what we are talking about. Just because you can’t afford to buy the most expensive processor in the stack shouldn’t mean that you have to compromise so much. Cutting the cache in half? That is not obvious to the typical customer.
When you step back and take a look at all of this in full, you see what was obvious before – 2P servers are the best value for most workloads – is becoming somewhat less obvious. And as we get into 2010, the value that AMD will bring to market will blur the lines even more. It’s time to stop looking at the world of sockets and start looking at the workload, the power consumption and the cost. Only then, does everything become obvious.
Otherwise you’ll just be like that young guy tonight, standing on the trail as the old guy blew past him. Sometimes the obvious answer isn’t always the only answer.
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.
Efficiency, Flexibility, and VMworld 2009
Posted by Andy Parma in 10:19 pm
Efficiency and flexibility are two of the themes for VMworld 2009, so it seems like an appropriate time to discuss the efficiency and flexibility of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture. As Tim Mueting and I discussed on YouTube , this architecture and AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology enable servers using AMD OpteronTM 8400 Series processors to consolidate more virtual machines than servers using a competing architecture1. Direct Connect Architecture also lets AMD deliver socket-compatible processor solutions ranging from our highest performance AMD OpteronTM 8400 SE Series processors to our new energy efficient AMD OpteronTM 2400 EE Series processors.
When Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2384 was introduced less than a year ago, servers using this processor achieved a number of performance records (here and here) and a key reviewer concluded that “Right now, it is clear that the latest AMD Opteron is in the lead.” If you look at the performance of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 2419 EE processor-based servers, you see that servers using this new low-power processor are outperforming servers using the Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2384. That’s pretty impressive.
And the energy savings from using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM EE processors (compared to 75W ACP Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors) are significant. When we replaced the 75W ACP Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors in a ZT Systems server with 40W ACP Six-Core AMD OpteronTM EE processors, server power consumption at 100% load dropped by 124W (40%).
Surpassing the performance of Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2384-based servers using extremely energy efficient processors is quite a feat. Achieving higher performance, while consuming less power, is even more impressive. To top it off, the Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2419 EE is being offered at the same price that the Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2384 was sold for last year2.
Higher performance. Lower server power consumption. Same introductory processor price. Wow!
As excited as I am about our current products, I can’t resist the temptation to mention the Six-Core AMD OpteronTM EE processors (codenamed “Lisbon”) that we’re planning to introduce next year. These six-core processors are planned to have a rated power consumption of less than 40W – that’s lower than the rated power consumption of most of today’s quad-core mobile processors. A processor that combines the registered memory and RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of a server processor with the power consumption of a mobile processor?
I think that I’ll be typing “Wow!” again next year.
Whether you think of “flexibility” as the ability to host more virtual machines using a Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 Series processor-based server, or you view “efficiency” as the capability to achieve higher performance while consuming less server power using Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 2419 EE processors, it’s clear that servers using AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture are ideal for the next generation of computing.
To find out more about AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology and AMD OpteronTM processors, visit us at booth 1408 at VMworld or visit www.amd.com/virtualization.
Andy Parma is a Product Marketing Manager 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.
1Based on 30 tiles x 6 VMs for 48-core HP ProLiant DL785 G6 server, as tested using the VMmark benchmark (http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html).
2Pricing for Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2384 reflects 1kU tray pricing on www.amd.com as of November 2008. Pricing for Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processor Model 2419 EE reflects 1kU tray pricing on www.amd.com as of August 2009.
Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Codenamed “Suzuka”
Posted by John Fruehe in 6:30 am
Brad Pitt’s brother isn’t the only one to live in the shadows of a more famous sibling. The latest AMD OpteronTM 1000 Series processor, codenamed “Suzuka”, was launched in the shadow of its 6-core bigger brother, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Istanbul.”
The AMD Opteron 1000 Series processor is designed for applications that are driven by cost or power concerns more than scalability. In the past, this meant a single core in a single socket, but in today’s multi-core world, this means four high performance cores in a single socket.
Typically, these processors are used in web servers, small business servers, workstations and even cloud computing. The flexibility of four cores and a low cost infrastructure gives customers an edge when designing for a cost-effective or power efficient platform.
With speeds of 2.5GHz, 2.7GHz and 2.9GHz, these single-socket processors pack a punch. It’s based on the same core as the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Shanghai,” so all the great features that you find in “Shanghai” are also in “Suzuka.”
One of the best parts about my job is that I have access to all the processors that I could ever want for testing. My server at home migrated from a dual-core AMD Opteron Model 185 processor to a new system board with a quad-core “Budapest,” which is a 2.3GHz processor based on the same core as “Barcelona.”
Recently, I upgraded that server to a pre-production “Suzuka.” I went from a 2.3GHz quad-core with a 2MB cache to a 2.9GHz quad-core processor with a 6MB cache. I saw an increase in performance, but amazingly, because Suzuka is on AMD’s 45nm process, I actually saw a decrease in total server power draw of about 10 watts. A performance increase, a big drop in power consumption – that makes the performance per watt story even better.
All I needed was a BIOS flash – the processor just dropped right into the same AM2 socket. The entire process was 5 minutes, and that included digging around under the sink to find some rubbing alcohol to clean the thermal paste off of the old processor. This incidentally, was the same process that you would have to go through in updating from a Rev F dual core processor to a “Budapest.”
Many may not know that our code names are derived from Formula 1 race tracks. Suzuka is a race course in Japan; recently it had been renovated and was re-opened in April of this year, just about the same time that we were finishing up the final touches and releasing our own “Suzuka.”
One of the biggest races at Suzuka is the 1000Km endurance race. A 1000 kilometer race? Sounds like the perfect compliment for an AMD Opteron 1000 Series processor. Both are designed for the long haul.
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.
Squeeze Play
Posted by John Fruehe in 10:18 am
Back in high school I played on an intramural soccer team. Our crowning achievement was not our win record, but the fact that we once fit 9 players into Mark’s 1982 Camaro. Not a small feat.
I am reminded of this when I see the new Boston Quattro 6000GP server. In the world of density, this product really stands out. Based on our new six-core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed “Istanbul,” this new server manages to squeeze a total of four discrete servers into a 2U chassis. The Quattro 6000GP has four separate system boards, giving customers four individual servers that can each operate independently, all within one chassis.
If you are running a very dense data center, perhaps HPC applications or cloud applications, then a system with this type of density can help you better manage your environment.
With four dual-socket system boards, you can install up to 8 total processors, or (with the new 6-core processors) have up to 48 total cores in a 2U space. Multiply that by the 21 slots in a standard 42U rack, and you have over 1000 cores in a 6 square foot space in your data center.
PCPro was impressed enough to give the Quattro 6000GP the PCPro Recommended award in recognition of the outstanding features and capabilities of this server.
In talking to customers, I’ve been told that data center density is often an issue, because data centers tend to be the most expensive floor space in the company. With special security, power, cooling and fire control, the cost of floor space in the data center is often not only the most expensive, but also the most difficult to expand when you need more room.
Greater density means better use of data center floor space, and the new six-core “Istanbul” processors can help customers to reach new levels of threads per square foot. In the Quattro 6000 GP, the compute nodes aren’t consuming all of the space in the server, however. There is still room for twelve SATA hard drives, giving you up to 12TB of storage, up to 3TB per server. Featuring green WD SATA hard drives, the system is designed to be energy conscious because Boston knows that you’ll be looking for maximum density.
Every time we drop in on Boston Limited, they always have something interesting up their sleeve, and the new Quattro 6000GP is a great showcase for the dramatic core density of Istanbul. Whether you have HPC, web, cloud or are facing density challenges in the data center, this is a new emerging form factor that is worth a look.
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.
Efficiency Computing with Dell PowerEdge Servers Powered by AMD Opteron™ processors
Posted by Guest Blogger in 11:14 am
The introduction of the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors (code named “Istanbul”) is big step forward for the IT industry. Dell works closely with AMD to address our customers’ needs with a full line-up of products to help simplify and lower the cost of managing their IT environments. The AMD Istanbul in Dell PowerEdge servers will do just that. We plan to introduce Istanbul in six servers in our portfolio including the PowerEdge 2970, R805 and R905 rack servers and the PowerEdge M605, M805, M905 blade servers.
Virtualization is one of the most effective ways for companies to improve server utilization and improve data center efficiency. A few years ago Dell and AMD collaborated to create some of the industry’s first servers optimized for virtualization, the Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 rack servers. The PowerEdge R905 based on the AMD Opteron processor is a great example of how we’ve fine-tuned our servers to provide virtualization performance. It is an ideal formula of processor technology, massive memory capacity and I/O scalability.
Our customers adopting the new Istanbul platform will see even greater virtualization performance with the new Istanbul processors. In fact, our initial benchmarks show a whopping 38 percent improvement in virtualization performance. We expect to continue to have industry-leading benchmarks for 4 socket servers with Istanbul.
With previous generations of AMD Opteron processors, we have had demand from companies with large data centers that have space and power constraints and from companies that need high availability for large databases. We have good news for these companies: the performance per watt equation just got better. The Six-Core AMD Opteron processors pack tremendous performance increases – we are seeing chart-popping 61 percent increases on SPECint benchmarks – into the same power consumption parameters.
Customers can get six-core performance in the same footprint as with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to run the most compute intensive applications and scale higher while conserving energy. Our customers can get improved performance in I/O intensive applications like databases and technical computing without taking up more floor space, and still operating in the same power envelope. We are pleased to offer companies in industries like high performance computing for geosciences, oil and gas exploration, life sciences and research the AMD technology-based systems they need for performance intensive virtualized applications.
Congratulations AMD on the successful, and early, launch of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.
Armando Acosta is product manager for Dell PowerEdge servers. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Dell testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. 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.
A Focus on the Economics of Data Centers
Posted by Guest Blogger in 11:13 am
(9 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)Sun’s focus on Open Network Systems – from silicon and servers, to storage, networking, and software – continues to deliver unprecedented speed, simplicity, and savings to our customers. As part of our Open Network Systems strategy, we plan to add the new Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor to our existing portfolio of rackmount server and blade systems.
Sun understands our customers’ increased focus on the economics of their data centers as well as their desire to reduce overall complexity. Sun’s enhanced line of x64 servers and blades will take advantage of the greater performance, virtualization capabilities, and energy efficiency technologies powered by the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor. Sun systems powered by AMD’s newest processor will deliver up to 50 percent performance improvements compared to previous generation systems, giving our customers the performance and efficiency to handle demanding workloads with superior economics and energy efficiency.
Ready to scale with a single, consistent platform that spans from 2P to 8P servers, Sun’s x64 systems offer many choices for customers to realize breakthrough performance and unmatched virtualization capabilities, for enterprise and web applications, while supporting multiple operating systems . And with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers greater virtual machine bandwidth than ever before.
Sun is committed to continued innovation along our x64 roadmap Companies small, medium and large are turning to Sun to quickly and easily upgrade, consolidate and virtualize their data centers to drive the overall efficiency and cost improvements their businesses demand.
As we optimize our new line of Sun x64 systems for the marketplace, stay tuned for more details on availability and pricing. Sun’s enhanced product lines and unique approach to Open Network Systems helps maximize the economics of computing by delivering maximum scale, efficiency, manageability, performance and sustainability. For more information, please visit www.sun.com/x64/amd today.
Dimitrios Dovas is Director of Systems Marketing, x64 Volume Systems at Sun. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Sun testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. 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.
Breaking New Ground: The Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor
Posted by Guest Blogger in 11:13 am
Cray has a long and distinguished history of providing high performance computing technologies that allow our customers to push the frontiers of science and engineering. Modern Cray systems do this by providing the world’s most scalable, general purpose supercomputing system for science, the Cray XT5. At the heart of the XT5 are four key legs of scalable performance: the processor, the network, the infrastructure and the software. Today, we welcome the introduction of a processor that breaks new ground in scalability, the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor.
We have been enthusiastically preparing for the arrival of AMD’s new processor, and we are pleased to be able offer both our new and existing customers a tremendous step forward in terms of performance, efficiency, price-performance and energy optimization. Simply put, our customers are going to love the level of scalability this processor provides.
The Cray XT series of supercomputers, including the Cray XT5 and the recently introduced Cray XT5m, equipped with this processor will feature a groundbreaking 12 cores per dual-socket computational node. The XT5m system, affectionately known as the “Mighty Mini,” will provide a powerful 1,000 to 6,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a single cost-effective, scalable and fully upgradeable mid-ranged system. With 10 to 60 teraflops in this mid-ranged system, this is certainly not your father’s mid-ranged supercomputer. The even more powerful Cray XT5 systems will provide virtually limitless scalability, ranging from 1,000 to more than 300,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a fully scalable hardware and software infrastructure.
Since we design our infrastructure for ease of upgradeability, our existing Cray XT5 customers can easily install the new six-core processor in their current systems with a simple processor swap and BIOS update. We have successfully migrated customers though four generations of AMD Opteron processor technology, from 1 to 2 to 4 and now to 6 AMD Opteron processor cores per socket and navigated the large system scalability challenges of each generation.
Our years of experience with these large HPC systems allows us to provide a proven, multi-core software environment that can take full advantage of this six-fold increase in scalability. Our software, including the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) and Cray Programming Environment (CPE) masks the growing complexities of this multi-core environment and provides users and administrators a unified environment that is different from the standard “cluster” experience.
What does this new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor mean for Cray, its customers and the HPC community?
We have a simple vision of our place in high performance computing. We want “better science” to be Cray’s sign and signature. The Cray XT5, utilizing Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, was the first general purpose system to break the petaflops barrier, providing a platform for groundbreaking science to hundreds of researchers in dozens of disciplines within weeks of installation. This new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor technology from AMD included in our XT5 and XT5m systems will mean more performance at a low cost, superior efficiency and more scalability. It means that researchers, scientists and engineers that utilize Cray supercomputers can now leverage a dramatic increase in computational power to address some of the world’s most challenging and sophisticated problems.
In short, it means “better science” and that is the most important thing of all.
Barry Bolding is Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Cray testing and have not been independently verified by AMD
Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed “Istanbul” – It’s Finally Here
Posted by John Fruehe in 6:28 pm
It’s odd to think that I would be using “finally” to talk about our Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codenamed “Istanbul.” We were supposed to be launching in October, but the health of the silicon and the fact that the initial version was deemed production ready by our industry partners meant we are looking at “Istanbul” in June instead.
We started shipping production units in May and today we are rolling out the red carpet to introduce “Istanbul” to the world. Over the next few weeks you’ll see our industry partners launching their “Istanbul”-based platforms.
So where do customers want to use these two extra cores? They want them in their databases, in their virtual environments and in their HPC/technical applications. Six cores will allow an application to break up problems into smaller chunks for a more parallelized completion of tasks.
We have been rapidly moving from a world of serial tasks to a world of parallel tasks. And as this happens, having more cores helps applications run more efficiently. Elegant design has won out over brute force in software programming. Not too long ago a single core processor delivered all of the performance that a customer needed, but now, as operating systems and applications have become more threaded, the need for more cores is becoming far more important.
So, this is the death of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Shanghai,” right? Hardly.
There are still plenty of applications that are less threaded and will enjoy the higher clock speed of our four core processors. The two products can live side by side in the product line, allowing customers to meet a wider range of application needs, all with a common platform underneath. Best of all, we offer both the four-core and the six-core for a range of platforms, from 2P to 4P and even 8P. No other company on earth offers the same commonality across that range of configurations. Only AMD delivers consistent four-core and six-core configurations across all of the different form factors, from the low-end 2P 8-core systems to the high end 8P 48-core systems. There is choice and flexibility across a highly scalable family of platforms from the leading server vendors.
With “Istanbul” we take the first important step towards the “high-low strategy” that we laid out in April. “Istanbul” meets the needs for high performance/highly scalable applications that crave more cores and more parallel processing. “Shanghai” fills the bill for those applications that need fewer cores and are focused more on energy efficiency or cost-effectiveness.
As the market continues to move in these two directions, we plan to be there with the product that customers need to handle their critical applications.
Now that Istanbul is “finally” out the door my wife asked me if things would quiet down and could I relax a little more. How do I break it to her that things are just getting started?
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.
Consistency
Posted by John Fruehe in 11:30 am
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Well, it appears that Ralph never ran a data center. Consistency is the holy grail of the data center, not the hobgoblin. When you have hundreds, or thousands of servers to keep track of, the more you can minimize the variances in hardware, the easier it is to manage the servers and your business.
Most IT teams typically spend the majority of their time managing software and not hardware. They realize that consistency can help reduce their software management tasks and make their lives easier.
Recently I read a blog on ZDnet where there is a potential concern about Windows XP compatibility on Windows 7 with some Intel desktop processors. The blog author, Ed Bott states “In the case of Intel’s phenomenally confusing product matrix, VT support is added and removed from CPU models for reasons that have more to do with marketing than technology.”
(Read about our close collaboration with Microsoft to ensure stability and compatibility for Windows 7 in Nigel Dessau’s recent blog.)
How is this possibly tied to enterprise severs? It’s all in the choices that your processor vendors make. If they focus on consistency your life can be a lot easier; but some unnecessary forced choices can diminish your efficiency.
The newest Intel Xeon processors appear to suffer from a similar marketing decision. At the top of the stack, the more expensive silicon has a full set of features. But as you roll down the stack, away from the premium priced parts down to the mainstream parts (where the majority of the parts are sold) you see that many of the features and capabilities are either reduced or actually absent.
On some models the QPI bus speed is dropped, there are actually 3 different bus speeds depending on which model you buy. Same with memory; three different memory speeds – meaning you have to stock multiple speeds of spares. Or you can choose to standardize on one speed, which means that you are either paying too much or compromising on the product, it’s your choice. Cache is similar – sometimes it is the full amount, sometimes it is half of that.
What about software-visible features? Well, if you are tuning you applications to see a certain number of cores or to anticipate a particular performance level, then the fact that features like HyperThreading or Turbo are available on some processors and not others can create real server issues for you. Because not all Xeons have those features you start multiplying the number of software images that you have to maintain. Or, to make your life easier, you just don’t support these features.
The AMD Opteron™ processor is different. When we design our processors, we hold the feature set consistent across the family. That means customers can minimize their software changes and make systems easier to manage. They can also do a better job of planning their deployments. Knowing the features are consistent they can more accurately model the different performance levels for different processors. Cutting features like cache as you move down the stack makes it more difficult to accurately predict performance levels.
While some may counter that you can “scale performance” up and down the stack, this only works if your applications scale all resources equally. If I/O and memory scale proportionately with CPU speed, then you are fine. But what about web applications with their heavy I/O requirements but low CPU performance needs? Well your choice is to overspend on the CPU to get the higher I/O performance or go with the lower priced CPU and compromise on the I/O performance that you likely need. Neither choice is optimal. That is why we drive for consistency.
The reality of the situation is that having consistent features doesn’t have to prevent you from having a full stack of processors. Artificial limits only take away, they don’t enhance. And as we are finding out on the desktop side, the strategy could have downstream impacts that you hadn’t counted on.
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.