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Analysis Vendors, vendors everywhere: Yep, all the major players turned up in Barcelona at the EMEA launch of AMD's so-called "native" quad-core Opteron processor chip. Well okay, nearly all.
Perhaps significantly, Microsoft was missing from the European arm of the jamboree that some observers have described as an incredibly important, make-or-break launch for AMD as it scrambles to pull back market share in the $40bn a year x86 tug of war with Intel.
But there were plenty of other tech giants present flexing their marketing muscles and touting a combined total of some 50 new products expected to flood the market over the coming week.
IBM, Dell, HP, Acer, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Novell, Sun and VMWare were all heavily preoccupied with fostering their relationship with Intel's bitterest rival.
Unsurprisingly, most remained securely on the fence, choosing their words carefully as they trumpeted what they saw as the positive aspects of the Opteron chip.
Skipping the fact that AMD has launched the chip that was originally code-named Barcelona six months late and at only 2Ghz performance, many of the firm's first tier partners instead sang the praises of virtualisation, energy efficiency and something the chipmaker dubbed as "investment protection".
Dell bigged up AMD's latest chip offering by confirming that it will release what it claimed will be the industry's first two-socket 2U virtualisation-optimised server in an exclusive platform partnership with the chipmaker.
El Reg asked Dell's EMEA servers and solutions director Eric Velfre how its relationship with AMD compared to Intel?
He said: "Competition is a good thing... But I think we've made a clear point here that right now AMD offers the platform of choice for us."
Strong stuff indeed.
Getting Dell's sales team, which has undoubtedly been grappling with the computer maker's recent decision to indirectly flog its PCs via the channel, to determine the benefits of Intel and the benefits of AMD is a constant focus, said Velfre.
COMMENTS
Re: A Bright New Day, Tomorrow?
I do hope you are referring to the x86 platform here? The big boys have been addressing this issue for a LONG time. Probably the best known example is Sun's Niagara chip, an 8 core, 32 thread SPARC proc with 4 memory controllers. This chip rocked on data shoving, multi-threaded applications such as web serving. A significant reason for this is the large memory bandwidth.
Anyway, my point isn't to start a SPARC vs. x86 war - they are two different worlds. I just wanted to point out that this problem really has been dealt with a long time ago, with a pretty good degree of success.
-daniel
fbdimms
I am confused about the whole fbdimm thing they supposedly have some benefit of use but from the comments I have read almost everywhere they seem to be hot and expensive there is no way in hell either of those is good for a server they are price sensitive as hell and thermal loading is a big problem maybe AMD is not such a long shot.
@Nexox Enigma
Thanks for posting. I'm aware of the NUMA configurations and the AMD performance from recent postings on, IIRC, a Beowulf mailing list. Candidly my conflict arises from a need to develop on a platform that is accessible to others, who for lack of a better word, might be described as multimedia 'enthusiasts', who, I see, as much akin to gamers. Even if I were to look at a workstation box I still don't like what I see on the market today. Lastly, having come up from 286 boxes, I'm gun shy of implementing relatively, expensive hardware solutions to bottlenecks such as those exemplified by the history of the PC bus, the more so when there's no apparent, widely held consensus. I guess this is where the 'bleeding' part of being on the 'bleeding edge' comes in. Thanks again.
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