Hasta La Gadget!

AMD might not be able to keep up (down?) with Intel in the CPU power consumption race, so it’s taking another tack with the new Opteron X-series: horsepower. It just announced the Opteron X1150 and X2150 64-bit processors for microservers, part of the Jaguar-codenamed family of CPUs arriving in the next-gen Xbox One and Sony PS4 consoles. Thanks to its ultra-low power 6-watt Atom S1200 chips, Intel excels in the low-power server market, and at 9W and 11W respectively (minimum), AMD’s CPUs consume considerably more juice. But AMD is pitching them as a better solution overall, thanks to those four cores (compared to two in the Atom), integrated AMD Radeon HD 8000 graphics on the X2150 model, support for 32GB of RAM and integrated SATA ports. AMD’s chips are pricier, though, at $64 (X1150) or $99 (X2150) compared to $54 for Intel’s Atom S1200 (all in quantities of 1,000). To top it off, Intel has new 64-bit Atom SoCs coming soon promising even lower power consumption — possibly leaving AMD to play catch-up again.

Filed under: Peripherals, Networking, AMD

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For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM’s Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it’s already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking it out of action today. Don’t mourn too much for the one-time legend, however. The blend of Opteron and Cell processors proved instrumental to understanding energy flow in weapons while also advancing the studies of HIV, nanowires and the known universe. Roadrunner should even be useful in its last gasps, as researchers will have a month to experiment with the system’s data routing and OS memory compression before it’s dismantled in earnest. It’s true that the supercomputer has been eclipsed by cheaper, faster or greener competitors, including its reborn Cray arch-nemesis — but there’s no question that we’ll have learned from Roadrunner’s brief moment in the spotlight.

Filed under: Science

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Via: NBC

Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

As a followup to its flagship Opteron 6300 launch last month, AMD has just released several more Piledriver-based processors meant for the server room. One eight-core and two quad-core models are part of the Opteron 3300 series, while the Opteron 4300 series gets six new CPUs: one quad-core, three six-core and two eight-core designs. With all this new silicon, IT pros may have concerns about compatibility issues — but fear not, for all of AMD’s new gear has sockets that fit in with the 3200 and 4200 series to make upgrading a painless process. Designed for small-to-medium sized businesses and web host servers, the chips are relatively inexpensive with prices ranging from $174 to $501, a far cry from the the $575 to $1,392 price of the higher-end 6300.

Despite the low cost, AMD claims the CPUs have a 24 percent performance per watt increase and 15 percent less power usage than their predecessors. The chip maker will likely still face an uphill battle against Intel’s mighty Xeon, but businesses looking to save a little cash might be the Opteron’s saving grace. There’s more detailed specs on the newly announced processors at the source, and you can get a peek at the pricing table after the break.

Continue reading AMD reveals Opteron 3300 and 4300 processors for the penny-pinching enterprise

Filed under: Desktops, AMD

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Via: PC Perspective

Source: AMD