AMD's 2012 - 2013 Server Roadmap: Abu Dhabi, Seoul & Delhi CPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 2, 2012 1:54 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Bulldozer
- AMD
- Opteron
- Interlagos
- Trade Shows
- AMD FAD 2012
We've got a server roadmap update from AMD courtesy of its Financial Analyst Day here in Santa Clara, California. The changes to the 2012 - 2013 roadmap aren't all that startling. Obviously this year AMD delivers top to bottom Bulldozer based CPUs. Interlagos, which we've already reviewed, features between 4 and 16 Bulldozer cores (2 - 8 modules). There are 2 and 3 module variants as well: Zurich and Valencia, respectively. All three of these Bulldozer based CPUs fall in the Opteron 6200 line.
Originally AMD had talked about introducing a new G2012 platform and delivering 10 & 20-core solutions called Sepang and Terramar. Those plans have been scrapped for the moment and what we get instead is a drop-in replacement for existing Opteron 6200 CPUs.
Take the current 6200 lineup, upgrade the CPU cores to Piledriver and you get a high level look at AMD's near-term server strategy. The sockets remain the same, as do the core counts, but performance should go up. AMD hasn't given us any more detail as to what Piledriver fixes other than to say that it's a higher IPC version of Bulldozer.
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DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
AMD will hit Sandy Bridge performance levels in 2014?tipoo - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Seems like it...If they are making an ARM based server CPU that seems a bit more promising though, lots of companies are shifting to low power but highly scalable systems rather than big powerful ones.dgingeri - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
I'd say they probably fixed the x86 decoder. When I first saw the Bulldozer architecture, I thought that decoder (4 instructions per clock cycle) looked a bit underpowered to supply 2 full integer cores and a shared FP unit. I really believe that's what's holding back Bulldozer.ShadyInc - Saturday, February 4, 2012 - link
I Agree with you.the decoder does seem to be quite under powered..!
Also there has been lots of talk about the loooooooooong pipeline Bulldozer has..!
the changes could be there as well..!
Though that would mean tinkering with the architecture to some extent, but hey, we are currently speculating, aren't we..?
rocketbuddha - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
AMD is still going to manufacture thier high end MPU in 2012 using 32nm SHP SOI process? So is GF really not investing in 28nm or 22nm SHP process in 2012 and even early 2013? IF so AMD is screwed on the high end....rocketbuddha - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol...Download the PDFs
PixyMisa - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Where AMD wins on the server side of things is price / performance. For 2S systems, motherboards are about the same price, but a 16-core Opteron 6272 costs half as much as the cheapest upcoming 8-core e5 Xeons. In 4S systems, the difference is even greater; with a $400 12-core Opteron squaring up against a $4000 10-core e7 Xeon.At work we've just added 5 48-core Opteron servers to our existing 6 32-core Opteron boxes. Equivalent Intel systems would have cost about twice as much, even though the memory and disks are all the same.
Doomessence - Saturday, March 3, 2012 - link
You forgot to add that HT(Virtual Cores) is kinda "bad" in the server market. And sometimes having more cores in lower clock is better than less high clock cores not only in servers, but I mean in graphic design.