Improved power management planned for Opteron
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Computers built with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor soon will be able to take advantage of the same power management technology the company has already built into its laptop and desktop microchips.
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(InfoWorld) - Computer maker Dell's solution to the datacenter energy crisis is to market more energy-efficient versions of its PowerEdge line of servers. Dell is scheduled to introduce on Monday the PowerEdge Energy Smart model 1950 and 2950 servers, which the company claims deliver a 25 percent improvement in performance per watt compared to the standard 1950 and 2950. The announcement follows Dell's September launch of Energy Smart OptiPlex business desktop computers. The Energy Smart server features include a processor that draws only 40 watts of power versus the 65 watts or 80 watts drawn in standard servers. Energy Smart servers will also offer only 2.5-inch disk drives, smaller than the typical 3.5-inch drives. Those design changes may diminish performance in a way some customers would find unacceptable, said Jay Parker, director of PowerEdge Servers in the Dell Product Group. But for others, the goal is energy efficiency. "We would expect somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range of our customers to be interested in this product and to ultimately migrate to this. But there is a whole other set of customers who need more configurability or [for whom] power efficiency is not a priority," Parker said. The Energy Smart servers also feature redesigned power supplies and cooling fans, as well as software that regulates the processors and memory to power the server up and down as computing demand changes. Vendors of servers, desktops, and other enterprise hardware are on anÂ energy-saving kickÂ these days, addressing the need to cut datacenter power consumption. The lifetime operating cost of powering servers and cooling them with air conditioning is becoming more of a concern to datacenter managers than the price of the server itself. Hewlett-Packard unveiledÂ on Nov. 28 what it calls "Dynamic Smart Cooling" for datacenters. Heat sensors on server racks send signals to a control panel that adjusts the air-conditioning output. HP's technology doesn't address the energy problem as directly as Dell does by making the server energy-efficient, Parker said. "You have to optimize the server, because ultimately that has a huge ripple effect on the other infrastructure pieces in the datacenter. In our mind [HP's technology] seems to ignoreÂ the first obvious step, which is to address the server itself," he said. Pricing for the Energy Smart 1950 starts at $2,449, $100 more than the standard 1950, Parker said. Pricing for the Energy Smart 2950 starts at $2,619.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market fromÂ its rival IntelÂ on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor. AMD has been shipping the Quad-Core AMD Opteron chip to server vendors throughout August but will use its news conference in San Francisco to publicly announce those partnerships as well as prices and benchmark test results. The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for the server and workstation division. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips. There is a lot at stake. After launching the original Opteron chip in 2003, the company enjoyed brisk demand as customers applauded the power-efficient performance of that 130-nanometer design process chip. But Intel soon got back in the fight as both companies built smaller, faster components, shrinking their chip scales to 90nm and adding a second core. AMD has endured disappointing results lately,Â posting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for recent quartersÂ and focusing its attention onÂ a merger with graphics chip maker ATI. At the same time, Intel claimed bragging rights to beating AMD to quad-core architecture andÂ 65nm scale chips with its ClovertownÂ server chip.Â Intel is also preparing to launch an even smaller-featured design in the fourth quarter with its 45nm Penryn chip. AMD says Barcelona is the answer to the Intel challenge. The chip is designed with all four cores on a single die as opposed to Intel's design of joining two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon chips, Allen said. Even more important, AMD upgraded each core from 64-bit floating point performance to 128-bit and retained its Direct Connect architecture and on-chip memory controller to avoid bottlenecks in data flow, he said. Thanks to that design, the new chip will provide better performance while using the same amount of power, he said. A customer could upgrade a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL 385 server from AMD's dual-core to quad-core Opteron and gain faster operation with the same power and cooling demands. "Clovertown will look very anemic, especially as we bring out new frequencies. Customers really don't buy nanometers. What they care about is performance and benchmarking," said Allen. "That Direct Connect architecture is very helpful with virtualization, running multiple OSes, and other applications pulling more data than can be held in on-chip memory." Despite those advantages, AMD has missed out on a spike in market demand driven by a need to upgrade to servers capable of performing virtualization, one analyst said. "A lot of people view this as six months late or more," said Doug Freedman, managing director for research at American Technology Research. "Expectations got ahead of themselves, and some people viewed this as a potential savior for AMD after their server share topped out at the end of last year going up against Intel's dual-die quad-core. Now the feeling is this launch isn't robust enough in terms of samples shipped, design wins, and the complete food chain." To recover, AMD will have to quickly increase its production and release faster versions of Barcelona to improve the chip's availability for a range of applications, Freedman said. Intel executives say they are pressing the lead. "We are very confident, at least on the DP [dual processor] side, that we will have leadership across most of the benchmarks versus Barcelona," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group. "There are a small percentage of benchmarks which are floating-point based where we know that they have an advantage and that's an area which we will see them talk about a lot.... If you look at the broader spectrum of applications at the enterprise, we have a significant lead today, and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45nm we will extend that lead further," Gupta said. However, some vendors say there is room in the market for both chips. Each processor has its own strengths, said Dell CEO Michael Dell in remarks to financial analysts at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on Wednesday. Based on early tests, Dell said, a server using Barcelona chips is faster at running floating-point applications than a computer with Intel's Clovertown chips, but Clovertown is faster than Barcelona at running integer instructions. "So depending on the applications you run, or your theories of computer science, one of those servers may be the best for you. It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to have only one of those choices," Dell said.
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PC performance will increase 70 percent for some applications, company says--but power consumption rises, too.
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An Intel open-source project called LessWatts.org hopes to improve the power efficiency of the Linux operating system and applications.
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Lower electrical power consumption, not just greater data processing oomph, will help a new class of desktop supercomputers unveiled on Monday turn conventional industry logic on its head, its designers say.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel Corp. quad-core microprocessors that work at an energy-efficient 50 watts per processor will officially be on the market starting Monday, according to the company. Each of the four cores in its new Xeon L5320 and L5310 will consume just 12.5 watts of electricity, according to Intel. The company claims the new Xeons use between 35 percent and nearly 60 percent less power than its existing 80-watt and 120-wattÂ quad-core server products. The L5320 operates at 1.86 GHz and the L5310 at 1.60 GHz. They both feature 8M bytes of on-die cache for faster memory data communication. In quantities of 1,000 units, the L5320 is priced at US$519 and the L5310 at $455. The new Xeons can be coupled with Intel's existing Bensley server platform, replacing existing dual-core or quad-core Intel processors. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are locked in competition for dominance in the quad-core chip market, as enterprises demand more performance out of servers. Meanwhile, customers are demanding greater energy efficiency as data center electrical costs rise. AMD in February released details of its coming new quad-core chip,Â code-named Barcelona, at a technical conference in San Francisco. Barcelona, due to be released midyear, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over AMD's own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron, in an earlier IDG News Service interview. Servers based on the new Xeons are expected to be available worldwide over the next few months from such server manufacturers as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and others.
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Surging data center power usage is building to a potential crisis, but there are many steps that IT managers can take today to start reducing power consumption without making a huge investment -- or sacrificing performance or availability.
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AMD uses a technology called PowerNow to control power supply to the processor depending upon how much of the processing power is being used.
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A new computer chip developed by Intel promises to perform calculations as quickly an entire data center, while consuming as much energy as a light bulb. By the Associated Press.
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New features of the processor include better security, management and energy savings.
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Company looks to leap past current limit of eight Opteron processors in a single server.
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Processors will be faster and use less power, add new multimedia features.
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Lower electrical power consumption,  not just greater data processing oomph, will help a new class  of desktop supercomputers unveiled on Monday turn conventional  industry logic on its head, its designers say.
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Processors offer significant power savings, chip maker says.
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SAN FRANCISCO--IBM will upgrade its Opteron-based e325 server for high-performance computing with Advanced Micro Devices&#39; dual-core chip in 2005, the company plans to announce Thursday.
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Licensing move will let others build specialized coprocessors that will plug into sockets tailored to Opteron or Athlon.