AMD doubles down on existing Opteron server sockets

As El Reg anticipated earlier this week, the new upper management at AMD has come to its senses and figured out that moving to a new core and two new sockets for its Opteron line in 2012 was not a particularly good idea for its own finances, or those of the server makers who it wants to peddle Opteron-based iron. And so, that …

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Bulldozer > Piledriver > Steamroller > Excavator >

Dumper?

[ChrisInAStrangeLand]

"which would have a greater level of parallelism. Su did not say, and it is likely that AMD is itself not quite sure what it means."

Perhaps one of the design engineers that the recently fired knows what it means.

[Ammaross Danan]

Fired?

"Perhaps one of the design engineers that they recently fired knows what it means."

If you churned out the pile that was Bulldozer, wouldn't you expect to get sacked too?

[Chris 228]

Piledriver cores should be a nice up-tick

The Piledriver cores should keep the Opteron CPUs alive and selling with increased IPC and low power consumption.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Nice

I am about to get a 64 core Opteron-based machine (4x 16 Bulldozer cores and 512 GB RAM (memory hungry, our applications?) ), and have funding for another machine somewhere down the line. Might well have a good look at the Piledrivers at that time.

[Phil Dalbeck]

Big Bulldozer boxes

I've just deployed a fully populated blade chassis with 8 quad socket 16 core Opteron 6276's.

512 cores and 2TB of ram in about 8U of rackspace (up to 30A under load admittedly).

Under the particular workload they're doing (heavily parallel, integer based, memory intensive workloads) they absoloutely scream when configured correctly. Each 2.6ghz (boosted) core is doing about 75% of the real world work that a 3.4ghz (boosted) workstation Intel sandybridge core was doing.

The key here is that for that level of density, and Intel solution was totally unfeasible - the cost to load up a blade with four 8 or 10 core Xeons was about 2.0-2.5x the price per blade, and would have delivered the same overall performance at best.

I see a lot of bashing of Bulldozer by people who aren't leveraging them at a decent scale - or are comparing them thread for thread against intels desktop SKU's. The Server/DC market is a very different beast however. Intel Xeon prices (and the associated platform) scale much more steeply than AMD's current offering as you increase core density, so pound for pound the AMD kit is a very realistic option right now.

[BlueGreen]

may I ask what on earth you're doing?

just curious, thanks.

[Ilgaz]

A guess

Integers mentioned with massive amounts of RAM. Finance I guess.

[Phil Dalbeck]

Highly scalable inhouse app for data crunching (can't be more specific than that I'm afraid...) - the important thing is I selected that hardware platform as it was the best fit for the task at hand - Bulldozer might be a lemon on the desktop atm (I don't think anyone could rationally argue otherwise), but I can assure you it was a real fight to get initial stock allocation of the 6276 2.3-2.6ghz 16 core CPU's (the sweetspot for powerdraw/price/performance it would seem) so they must be selling for AMD!

[admiraljkb]

I've been impressed with a newly constructed ESXi 5 server

I'm with Phil. For server usage, AMD's Bulldozer tech is right there, where in Desktop, its in the meh category currently.

I've got an ESXi5 server sipping 35 watts with a single 2.6Ghz 8 core 6212 under light load with 2 VM's powered up full time, and really smooth performance as dev use VM's come and go. It replaced a previous PhenomII "server" in the same role that was using 75 watts and had spottier performance as VM's ramped up. After this success, I went to build a second server (replacing another "server" that was mostly desktop components), and had a heck of a time getting a second 6212. Had to temporarily source a 6128 to keep the project going forward, and then swapped it out last week for the 6212.

@Phil - Seems to be limited Interlagos supplies right now. Right after I ordered the second 6212, they were out of stock again, so my (obviously) more limited proc purchasing experience has matched yours. WOW, you've got a hell of a server.

Since AMD for some bizarre reason dusted off the FX label for 1st gen Bulldozer, it has made it hard to explain to the desktop/gamers though that Bulldozer was not meant for them. It does really well on highly threaded loads and virtualisation though, but not much of that load on the average desktop currently. :) On that same line though, Phenom II's (and the Intel i7's) do fine on desktop, but aren't necessarily great for server loads either.

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD has a winner with Bulldozer based Opterons

As Phil has mentioned, BD/Opterons are a hit for performance and value and AMD is cranking them out the door as fast as possible. It's a Win-Win for consumers so there is no point in hating on AMD. While BD/Zambezi is far less impressive for desktop, BD/Opteron works quite well.

[Ilgaz]

I really don't get it

I upgraded a cheap, low end business desktop from single core to dual without having to change anything else and paid only $75.

On the other hand, Intel does real cheap tricks like adding extra pin etc.

Amd also grew up, they don't claim weird things anymore, thank God the megahertz fake wars are over after losing 3 years of it progress (for Intel especially) and haven't heard amd saying they beat i7 etc.

So why would anyone hate amd? Intel? It would be their worst day if amd died.