Posts tagged with Virtualization
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)
Loading ...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.
AMD Opteron Processors + AMD Chipsets = the Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts
Posted by John Fruehe in 10:00 pm
It’s a cloudy afternoon here in London, which is great because yesterday I was soaked while trying to see customers. Clouds trump rain any day in my book. A little known fact (outside of this country) is that the city of London is actually 2 cities, the City of London and the City of Westminster.
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 OpteronTM 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 HyperTransportTM 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.
Under the Influence
Posted by John Fruehe in 12:31 pm
NetworkWorld recently released its list of the 11 Most Influential Microprocessors of All Time. I have to agree that the AMD OpteronTM 240 Series processor is one of the most influential processors because it is the singular reason that I left my last job of almost ten years – I came to AMD specifically to work on the AMD Opteron processor because I realized the game-changing potential of this technology.
The list is a relative “who’s who” of the microprocessor world. Every processor clearly had a huge impact on the market, and it is an honor to be included in the list. Most importantly, we are the only processor in the list that was released after 1993. AND we are the only one that is still in the market today in any reasonable volume (somehow, somewhere, somebody is probably utilizing the others because they were such strong designs).
Back in 2002, a year before the launch of the AMD Opteron processor AMD and Microsoft announced a cooperative effort to develop 64-bit version of windows for AMD 64-bit processors. We were the first mainstream processor to enable 64-bit, and our shared vision was that 64-bit computing would drive the data center of the future. I guess you could say that we helped influence the move to 64-bit.
In 2003, there was no such thing as a “low powered server processor.” Enterprise-class processors were big, hot and power hungry. Now look at where we are today. The new AMD Opteron EE processor delivers six cores in a single processor, with a 40W ACP. Power is one of the biggest concerns in the data center today, and we influenced the market with the introduction of power efficiency for servers back before people realized how important power would be.
What about price? If you can remember the pre-AMD processor Opteron days (or the “dark ages” as I like to call them), there was little competition in x86 server processors. Price/performance was a very limited concept, your price/performance came at the platform level, not really at the processor level. Prices were significantly higher than they are today. AMD influence? Check.
Remember the world of single core computing? It may be hazy for most of you because for the past 4 years, almost every server processor sold was probably a multi-core. And who had the first multi-core X86 processor? Yep, the influencer.
So what does the server processor of 2009 look like? Well, let’s take a look at the profile:
- Multi-core
- 64-bit x86
- Integrated memory controller
- Low power options
- High performance per watt
- High price performance
- Hardware-based virtualization capabilities
When you put the list together, it is clear that AMD has had a significant impact on the server processor market. Regardless of which processors you are deploying, what you enjoy today in your X86 data centers are either AMD Opteron processors, or processors that have been heavily influenced by our technology decisions. Some would say that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I like to call it influence.
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.
Cash for Clunkers
Posted by John Fruehe in 11:34 am
One of the hardest parts about managing a data center is not necessarily the task of “keeping the lights on”, but instead, it’s “changing the bulbs.”
This week I am hearing a lot about the “cash for clunkers” program here in the US, where older cars can be traded in for newer more fuel efficient vehicles, with the government kicking in some rebate dollars to make it all happen if you are buying a more fuel efficient vehicle. I’m not going to even pretend to think about this from a political sense (there is a reason I chose product marketing and not politics), but, from a business sense, this sort of activity is happening in data centers all over the world. Even without the government assistance.
Are people changing out servers just to drive more efficiency? Hardly. But in a tough economy, they think about optimization, they think about efficiency and they think about virtualization when they have to make a change.
As customers look to pull the plug on older servers that are past their useful life -- either through warranty or lease expiration, or potentially due to a hardware failure that is too costly to repair -- they are looking to more power efficient servers as well as virtualization to solve their future computing challenges.
The migration to a new platform is costly, time consuming and full of interesting challenges. One way to overcome some of these challenges is to use virtualization to encapsulate the server, creating a virtual machine. With the system image (software) now physically abstracted from the hardware, it can be moved anywhere around the data center, or around the world.
This new level of abstraction is great, but one of the real challenges is that a virtual machine has to take the “lowest common denominator” in order to move between two systems. The flexibility to move virtual machines around, at will, is dependent on the underlying hardware.
AMD has designed an amazing consistency in our architectural design, allowing a server to have backwards and forwards consistency in moving virtual machines -- a feat that is much more challenging on other’s platforms unless you really scale the virtual machine back to a very simple configuration.
Here, we actually demonstrate taking a virtual machine from an old dual core, to a newer six-core platform, and then move that virtual machine to our future AMD OpteronTM 6000 processor-based platform.
As you look to optimize your data center, utilizing AMD Opteron processors can help keep your environment humming along, with the ability to load balance and drive incredible efficiency through virtualization. The fact that we can deliver such flexibility across the board shows that AMD understands the challenges that you face, and we tailor our products to meet those needs.
Not only can we help you drive better efficiency by moving from older AMD platforms to AMD’s newer, more power efficient platforms, but our common socket strategy allows many of the AMD OpteronTM based-platforms to be easily upgraded from dual core to quad core, or even six core, virtually without having to change out any other hardware. It’s an instant upgrade in performance, all within the same general power and thermal ranges.
These are just two more ways that AMD is helping you drive more efficiency in the data center. Maybe we can’t hand back “cash for clunkers”, but we can help get you back on the road to recovery, and that’s where we all want to be these days.
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.
Energy Efficient Four-Socket Servers – REALLY?
Posted by Andy Parma in 9:27 pm
As VMworld 2009 approaches, I’ve been thinking about virtualization and energy efficiency and how they apply to four-socket servers. I know what you’re thinking – isn’t an energy efficient four-socket server an oxymoron like a hybrid SUV?
First, let’s take a closer look at how IT managers are actually using four-socket servers. It’s very rare for four-socket servers to be used strictly as a way to increase compute density. Appro and SGI have twin servers and half-depth servers to serve this purpose. In most cases, four-socket servers are used for applications that require a single server to have access to large amounts of memory. These applications typically consist of database, virtualization/consolidation, and some high performance computing applications. With the ability to support 32 memory DIMMs per server, optimized virtualization features such as AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology, and unique energy efficiency features (AMD-P), Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors are ideal for these applications.
When comparing the feature sets of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors and Intel Xeon 7400 series (”Dunnington”) processors, the feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors is in stark contrast to the Intel Xeon 7400 series offerings. Four items about the Xeon 7400 series stand out:
- The feature set differs dramatically between each of the seven models in the Xeon 7400 series
- No Xeon 7400 series processor includes RVI or Tagged TLB virtualization features
- The low-power Xeon L7445 and L7455 do NOT include the same energy efficiency features as the highest performance Xeon X7460
- All Xeon 7400 series processors use Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory
The feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors gives customers a more predictable approach to data center planning and helps capacity planning, software image development, and validation efforts.
What about the performance and value of servers using these processors? If servers using Intel processors are clearly superior, then the differing feature sets won’t matter, right?
While the 46% VMmark performance advantage that a four-socket AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processor-based server has over the top-performing four-socket Intel Xeon 7400 series processor-based server is impressive, I think that the performance of energy efficient Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processor-based servers is even more impressive. This comparison shows that, depending on benchmark, a server using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors can provide nearly double the server performance of a server using low-power Hex-Core Intel Xeon L7455 processors at nearly half the processor price. Servers using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processors even significantly outperform servers using the highest performance, highest power Hex Core Intel Xeon X7460 processors, again at nearly half the processor price.
When combined, all of these advantages (superior performance, energy efficiency, virtualization features, and pricing) make the Six-Core AMD Opteron 8400 series processors the ideal solution for four-socket servers.
Now, let’s go back to my original analogy about the hybrid SUV. In theory, the reason that people buy an SUV is because they need to move a lot of stuff, whether that’s people, groceries, or furniture. It’s the same way with four-socket servers – people buy a four-socket server because they need lots of memory to process lots of stuff, whether that’s database applications, virtualization/consolidation, or processing large datasets in high performance computing applications. Why shouldn’t you able to process lots of “stuff” and get energy efficiency too?
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.
Playing 20 Questions (Part 2)
Posted by John Fruehe in 12:18 pm
Last week, I kicked off the first round of “20 Questions” by answering questions around our upcoming server platforms. This week I’ll focus on questions I’ve received related to virtualization and cloud computing.
When AMD pushed further into “Cloud\VM” computing there was talk of enabling GPUs as APUs in “future” sockets. Where is that initiative and where is it going?
Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are essential to AMD’s product strategy and roadmaps. We still continue to see the potential for GPGPUs handling certain types of server workloads. However, this technology faces some challenges before becoming “the next big thing” for cloud clusters. The first is the programming model. One way we plan to address this is through the work that our ATI Stream team is doing around OpenCL, (ATI Stream technology is key in merging the GPU and CPU to form an APU)a framework for writing applications that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of modern multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and other processors
The second challenge is the power and cooling aspect of the solution. Customers are moving towards lower power solutions, especially in cloud, and CPUs are now approaching levels of performance/watt that still make them the leading choice for mainstream applications. The final area is the prioritization aspect. GPGPU is an emerging technology for servers. Integration into client processors has a much greater benefit for both customers and AMD so you will see much more emphasis on client integration first.
How will AMD address Green Computing?
We plan to continue to deliver low power processors, such as our HE and EE power bands. A new planned platform definition for Socket F, codenamed “Kroner” is focused as a “best practice for power management and design.” We expect to see a future “Kroner” follow-on platform that continues that thread. The C32 processors are really targeted at customers who want power efficiency, but we also plan low power options for the G34 processors as well. We are also planning enhancement to our AMD-P feature set with new technologies that are expected to help increase the power efficiency at the processor level, the platform level, and even at the data center level.
AMD has several initiatives targeting “cloud computing” and virtualization. Doesn’t this reduce the market for AMD products, since customers would buy only one server where they would have bought several?
Back when we are all in a single core world, everyone expected that dual-core would reduce the number of servers. It didn’t happen. Neither did the transition to quad-core. As virtualization and cloud computing help make IT more efficient, this can free up dollars for more investment in other areas. In any IT shop you’re likely to find that for every project that they are working on, there are dozens of other that they can’t fit into their budget. Add to this fact that world Internet usage is probably less than 25% today. As use of the Internet as a vehicle to deliver applications, data, and services continues to increase throughout the world, there is an obvious continued need for servers to power web and cloud clusters.
While AMD has made progress in the area of energy efficiency (e.g. AMD OpteronTM EE processors, Cool’n'QuietTM technology), does AMD feel there is more room for improvement in this area?
There is always room for more improvement. Power efficiency will continue to be an important focus for us.
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.
Not Lost in Translation
Posted by John Fruehe in 8:03 am
Spend any time in a foreign country and you get a new respect for the bilingual folks in the world. Especially those that can seamlessly move between two very different languages. After 3 years of high school German, I can stumble my way through German as long as the conversation is simple (especially if I am talking to children). I’ve made my way through Spain, France and Italy with the help of dictionaries and patient people.
But even with a dictionary, I fell all over myself in Japan. Having dinner with a friend last week who has been in Japan for several years, it was amazing to see him move between a conversation with me in English and Japanese conversations with the waiters without even hesitating. It was second nature to him. Seamlessly moving between the languages was far more efficient than trying to look up a sentence in the dictionary one word at a time.
That drove home the concept behind our Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) feature that is integrated into all AMD OpteronTM four and six core processors.
Much of the overhead of virtualization is from having to translate memory requests between the individual virtual machine and the physical hardware. In the old world, these translations were handled in the software – an infinitely slower process.
Today, that translation is done in silicon, speeding up the process greatly. Increasing the speed of memory translation is important because this is one of the biggest bottlenecks for virtualized servers. And as the memory footprint of the average server increases, this becomes even more critical.
Virtualization is one of those IT directions that is not a trendy “flavor of the week.” Virtualization was how we managed computing resources back in the “big iron age” when mainframes, costing millions of dollars were subdivided to provide virtual computing resources. Every department couldn’t afford their own mainframe, so there wasn’t a question about the value of virtualization. As servers became far less expensive, throwing hardware at the problem was a quick fix. Until we all started running out of space.
With the clear trend back to virtualization, there are hardware implementations of virtualization that can be done to help improve performance and processing efficiency. RVI is one of them, and in the second half of this year, you should expect to see new systems based on our next generation server platform. This new AMD platform is designed for “Shanghai” or “Istanbul” processors coupled with the new AMD SR56×0/SP5100 chipset.
This chipset will feature IOMMU, which is another hardware-based virtualization feature. IOMMU allows you to virtualize I/O traffic, enabling greater performance, scalability and efficiency as well as increased security by providing independent virtual I/O channels.
Through IOMMU, again, the I/O communications are translated at the hardware level vs. at the software level, providing greater performance and efficiency.
So as I stumble around like an old server, trying to manually translate the menu and Ramen Jinro, my friend will be able to do it on the fly without even thinking about it. Nothing is lost in translation and it happens so much faster when it is done at the hardware level. Progress is great on this front, and one day I hope to catch up with the rest of the world. Hopefully my noodles won’t be cold by then.
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.
That Five-letter Dirty Word
Posted by John Fruehe in 9:24 am
Value. There, I said it. Someone once threatened to wash my PowerPoint slides out with soap for using it.
But customers care about it. Today, more than ever; but even in the crazy dot-com 90’s, people still gravitated to value. Who doesn’t want to get the best value for their IT investments? In the business world, people just don’t burn money; it never makes sense.
On the consumer side, people sometimes associate “value” with “cheap.” But that might be because consumers tend to buy one computer at a time. They research the purchase, they obsess, they compare. Nobody wants to go “cheap” because it is their one shot for the next few years.
However, in the enterprise world, server purchases are a constant fact of life, not a single point in time. Most companies, even in today’s environment, continue to deploy servers and look for the best value that they can get, usually with a price/performance or performance/watt metric. Rarely is the decision made just on raw performance.
I have been a critic of performance benchmarks as much as I have been a fan of them. One of the problems that we see in so many benchmarks is that they fail to comprehend the value of the solution – they only measure one vector. Typically that is raw performance.
Take VMmark for instance. If you take the results at face value, it shows you the approximate performance of different systems. But, it is showing the performance for a specific configuration. Perhaps a configuration that you may never actually deploy in real life.
We recently introduced our new Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, and along with those processors there were several new benchmark results introduced, including a VMmark benchmark.
Just looking at the raw benchmarks, one might conclude that a 2P Nehalem-based system is going to be a better choice because of the higher performance. However, Collin MacMillan points out in his Solution Oriented Blog that if you look at only one vector, raw performance, then you might miss the big picture. The reason is that, depending on configuration, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP DL385 can be priced almost 2/3 less than the Nehalem-based HP DL380 server.
Just over one third of the cost. That is just stunning. Especially when you consider that the typical customer may be loading 5-10 virtual machines on a single 2P server.
Maybe I am going out on a limb here, but if I was trying to justify a virtualization project, I think that telling the CIO to replace 5-10 physical servers with a single server that costs nearly 3X as much as a competing product is simply a losing proposition.
My colleague, Margaret Lewis, takes a closer look at configurations and pricing of Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems (“Istanbul”) and Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor-based systems (“Gainestown”) that have posted top VMmark scores.
In the enterprise world, value might not have the same stigma that it has in the consumer world, and that is why enterprise customers don’t seem to be afraid of it.
When you are lining expensive data centers with row after row of computing devices, someone is bound to ask you what all this is costing and where is the benefit. If you are buying servers based on our new Six-Core AMD Opteron processors you can rest assured that you are filling your data centers with a superior value – and that speaks volumes.
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.
Six-Core AMD Opteron Processor Press Kit
Posted by Jake Whitman in 11:59 am
Five months ahead of schedule, AMD announces availability of the world’s first six-core server processor for two-, four- and eight-socket servers. Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors (code-named “Istanbul”) extend AMD’s commitment to offering server customers maximum value at every price point with unmatched platform flexibility.
Resources
View the AMD Opteron Processor Family
Download the Press Presentation
Find Pricing for AMD Opteron Processors
Learn about Key Architectural Features
Go to AMD’s Cloud Computing Page
See which AMD Partners are Launching Six-Core AMD Opteron Processor-Based Systems
Read Cray’s Press Release Supporting the “Istanbul” Launch
Video
Watch videos on the AMD Opteron Express YouTube Channel
Watch what Industry Analysts have to say about the Six-Core AMD Opteron
OEMs and Partners Discuss “Istanbul”
Images
View Images of the new Six-Core AMD Opteron Processor
Blog
Read John Fruehe’s blog post on AMD@Work
“Istanbul” launch blog from HP
Read VMware’s blog post about live migration and benefits of “Istanbul”
AMD@Work blog with guest posts from Cray, Dell, and Sun Microsystems
Read another Dell blog post about “Istanbul” firing on all cylinders