The first box is big. Really big. Ripping off the paper I see it’s a brand new Sun X4640 8P server with Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors. This new server is in the spotlight because of two of the new benchmarks that were just released this week. New records for SPECompL®2001 and SAP 2-tier Sales and Distribution benchmarks show the great performance of this 48-core platform. As a great platform for enterprise class business applications and consolidation, this is one worth checking out.

Don’t you hate having to track down batteries for your gifts?  Why can’t they be more power efficient?  Well, at PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), they deployed a cluster based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors, specifically, our 8000 series.  Utilizing a new 4P SuperMicro blade platform that features the new AMD 5600 series chipsets, the blade chassis are capable of supporting 10 blades, which results in 240 cores per 7U chassis. This case study shows how PRACE utilized our technology, along with SuperMicro blades, to solve their supercomputing challenges.

When looking for that perfect gift, many of us gravitate to the internet, that series of tubes that gives us all of the data that we need every day.  This morning I was reading Infoworld’s review of the Dell PowerEdge 805 and 905 servers.

“In our tests, we find that the performance has greatly improved. Further, the price of the R805 has come down significantly. As a result, the price-performance ratio, always a strength of Dell’s product lines, is hugely better than it was a year ago. In addition, power consumption is vastly improved for both models. It’s hard to recall so much progress made in three different areas in any year-over-year hardware comparisons.”

So, compared to systems based on our previous quad-core processors from just last year, these Dell servers offer greater performance (expected when comparing 4-core to 6-core) but also lower price and better power consumption.  That sounds like great performance-per-watt-per-dollar to me, which is my favorite holiday song.

Now, time to clean up the wrapping paper, get another cup of coffee and get back to work, because, after all, we have a pretty big package to wrap up for Q1 and all the cool kids are putting that on their wish list for 2010.

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.

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.

In light of this debate, I also talked last week with Graham Lovell at Sun -- one of our technology partners. (You can watch a bit of our conversation below.) Graham is the director of Open Storage and let me tell you, he gets it.  Their Amber Road product line has effectively addressed the important issues that customers can face in determining the storage component of a data center strategy – specifically the need to have highly scalable storage capacity on a high performing network  - storage that is simple to manage and power efficient.  Interesting how storage and server requirements are converging these days.

It seems the tide has been turning a bit in the storage world and there’s a lot more to consider now beyond the “classical” fail-safe back-up.  There are synergies to be had by looking at the overall server/storage/software/virtualization equation.  Sun’s delivered a product line that takes a building block approach to integrating the crucial storage element because that’s the direction the IT managers and the businesses they support are going.  Simple as that.  (Take a look at the massive Internet Archive project which is using AMD Opteron™ processor-based storage in a Sun Modular Datacenter.)

There will likely always be a place for the more traditional back office systems.  But expensive implementations based on proprietary technology and that don’t readily mesh with the increasing need for quick, local, on-demand storage arguably aren’t the best fit given the direction our customers are going.

With more customers looking to virtualization to solve their IT needs, consolidation of storage is likely going to be that “critical first step” in getting the most out of a virtualized environment. Flexibility becomes more important and products like Sun’s Amber Road, built on AMD Opteron processor technology, help drive the right solutions.

Delivering technology that lets you build what you need, when you need it and do so with maximum efficiency -- that still sounds like the right way to go.  I can’t see a future where that doesn’t make sense.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DuswZrVcj4

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.

“ First, all top-tier DBMS vendors such as […] are delivering high performance and scalability to support most large workloads. Second, TPC benchmarks no longer reflect the complex workloads of today’s real-world deployments. Third, customers that need high-end performance often prefer internal benchmarks to TPC benchmarks. Finally, virtualization, cloud computing, and database-as-a-service are changing the way customers deploy databases, and TPC does not address these architectures.” (from “TPC Benchmarks Don’t Matter Anymore:  Features and Cost are Key Factors When Choosing a DBMS” by Noel Yuhanna with Mike Gilpin and David D’Silva, March 6, 2009, copyright Forrester Research)

This touches on a larger issue that we have blogged about before – we are seeing here at AMD that data center demands on the whole are changing. There is less stock being put into how a hardware or software product performs in a lab, and more emphasis on total cost of ownership and how they perform in real-life scenarios.

 I want to be clear, there is a place for benchmarks, and we absolutely value how our products perform against the competition in a standardized setting. For instance, our 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ 8384 processor just set another world record virtualization score on the VMmark test (29.11@19 tiles on a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server running VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor.) We also just set the record on the SPECweb2005 benchmark, measuring web server performance, with 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors in the four-socket 2RU x64 Sun Fire X4440 server.

However, both AMD and our OEM partners recognize that they are merely a component of the overall value equation. The days of saying that purchasing decisions can be simplified based on a single benchmark are long gone.

Benchmarks don’t always reflect real-world implementations but they have been accepted by and large by the industry as a good initial performance indicator. In fact, benchmark progression can even sometimes be interesting to track as multicore processing is crunching data at unprecedented speeds, resulting in some eye-popping results. AMD recognizes that there are always going to be applications that require the best raw performance. However, recent processor unit data from Mercury Research shows that high-end, performance processors are less than 10 percent of the market today.  This tells us that customers ultimately buy on more than just raw performance. They look at how a system is optimized for software, what level of energy is it going to consume, how scalable is the hardware, and in today’s economic environment, price-performance and TCO are more critical than ever.

Whether it is a DBMS or not, Forrester raises a really good point here, and one that – at a minimum – is worth discussing, regardless of if you agree or disagree. There are many factors beyond TPC performance  - reliability, manageabilty, security, performance to name a few – that impact a decision to buy and are spanning all enterprise computing environments. More specifically, how these factors impact the ongoing demands of your business (something we like to call the “workloads that matter”) is only going to become increasingly important.

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.