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AMD Aims For The Cloud
Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday is expected to announce new Opteron 3200 series chips for low-end servers, which the company believes will give it a competitive edge over Intel in the cloud server arena.
The three Opteron 3200 chips are for use in single-socket servers for Web hosting and cloud applications, according to a company presentation. The chips have up to eight processor cores, clock speeds of up to 3GHz, and draw between 45 watts and 65 watts of power.
The new chips are based on the Bulldozer processor architecture, which is also in the Opteron 6200 16-core processors and FX-series gaming chips. The Opteron 3200 launch comes after AMD in late February announced it would pay US$334 million to acquire SeaMicro, which offers dense and power-efficient servers for cloud computing environments.
AMD’s chips will likely compete against Intel’s Xeon E3 series chips, which are used in SeaMicro’s SM10000-XE server. Intel worked with SeaMicro on the server, but analysts have said that AMD will ultimately swap Intel’s chips with its own chips.
AMD is pitching the Opteron 3200 as a “low-cost-per-core” product. The chips are priced between US$99 and $129, while Intel’s E3 chips are priced between $189 and $885. MSI, Tyan, Fujitsu and Dell are expected to launch Web servers and dense systems based on the chips.
AMD’s expanded product line provides an entry point to new markets, said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat.
But the Opteron 3200 could be a misfit in servers if competing on price versus performance-per-watt, McGregor said. There is a growing interest in deploying low-power servers in data centers to cut energy costs, but the Opteron 3200 chips are comparatively power-hungry for such installations.
AMD’s Bulldozer Overclocked To 4.63 GHz
It appears that those techies toying around with samples of AMD’s FX-8130P were able to overclocked this processor to a remarkable 4.63GHz.
That said, Bulldozer appears be AMD’s fastest offering where the eight cores run at 3.8GHz, or up to 4.2GHz with AMD’s Turbo Core 2.0. The processor 8MB of L2 cache, 8MB of L3 cache, supports DDR3 1866MHz and is said to have a 125W TDP.
AMD’s Bulldozer Will Be Late
AMD has confirmed that their Bulldozer chip-set will be delayed until later in the summer.
The FX Series which is codenamed Zambezi is based on the Bulldozer architecture. Unfortunately, AMD didn’t provide an official date they just said that the FX Series is coming in “late summer”, which means do not expect to the chip until probably late August.