Dell to Use AMD Chips in its Servers

garfangle writes "Dell has decided to include AMD's Opteron processor in its product line of servers. This is the first time Dell has used AMD chips within its own Dell branded products (excluding the recently acquired Alienware computers)." From the News.com article: "The deal appears to be confined to servers at this point. The news came along with the release of Dell's earnings results, which were in line with the disappointing warning the company provided last week. Revenue was $14.2 billion, up 6 percent from last year, but net income slid 18 percent to $762 million. Several times during the last few years, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has hinted that the company was right around the corner from introducing products based on AMD's chips."

Comments

The apocolypse is nigh...

[doormat]

I really think the reason they're finally using AMD chips is that AMD will finally have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell. Fab36 is delivering revenue now, and will ramp more as the year goes by. Between Fab36 and their relationship with Chartered Semi, they can supply Dell with the chips they need. And since its most likely they'll be 4S (8 core) servers, for ever server dell sells, they'll need 4 chips from AMD.

Re:The apocolypse is nigh...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You have that wrong. In order to go more than two-way (two socket) AMD systems, you need to buy Opteron 8xx chips. Those are very expensive, almost as much as Xeon MPs in many cases. The first digit of Opteron numbers note the number of chips that can cooperate at once, 1xx is one socket, 2xx is two socket and 8xx for up to eight.

Re:Intel wall starting to crumble

[rachit]

They are initiating outsourcing of some production to Chartred.

I assume they planned in advance for this, since if the Dell deal didn't go through, they could cancel the Cartred deal without having tons of spare capacity on thier hands.

With 20/20 hindsight, looking at AMD's Chartred plans, it should have been pretty obvious that AMD had a big customer lined up. Too bad I didn't have that foresight, otherwise I could have made some good cash on AMD stock.

As a former datacenter manager

[linzeal]

When we compared the power draw for opterons versus itaniums at the time when such a battle was being contested, the results were pretty bleak for Intel and anyone associated with them. We setup a subsidary company to build custom servers for our project and we saved pry 20,000 dollars in electricity costs over the life of the project. 3 years and 2000 servers. Why is Intel so stupid when it comes to power consumption for server processors? The air conditioning is what gets you when you have 2000 200-300 watt proccessors that is a helluva lot of energy to cool.

Re:As a former datacenter manager

[hackstraw]

Itanic had far and away the best fp scores when it came out. If what you had to do was almost all fp math then the itanium made sense at the time, possibly even from a flops-per-watt standpoint. Today it's just a footnote to a sad joke.

Yeah, use Itanic and bust on an Intel chip and get modded up around here, but Itaniums are good chips, and they have a market, but a fairly small one right now. They have up to 1.3GHz models that use less power than a Xeon. They use 62 Watts of power. Current Opterons use anywhere from 62 Watts to 110 Watts.

No, odds are you can't justify one in your home, but for high performance floating point apps that need high memory bandwidth, Itaniums are still pretty much #1.

Intel has been pretty aggressive in their power/flop ratio here lately and they are making excellent progress. Even crap chips from Intel such as the i860 turned into the Xscale processors.

I've been using Itaniums from two different vendors for almost 4 years now, and I have no regrets. Opterons are damn good chips. The HTX spec is excellent. But its difficult to say which one is better at this time. I believe that the compilers are better for Itaniums than Opterons, but I haven't looked very deep into the good compilers for Opterons and have run no benchmarks yet. Its a tough call, and the competition is great.

Re:As a former datacenter manager

[Wdomburg]

Interesting, their datasheet seems to be out of date. They don't mention the low power part.

On the other hand, you're still looking at 62W for a single core part compared to 55W for a dual core. And looking a little further, it looks like AMD has added a new "EE" (energy efficient) line which run at 1.4GHz and draw only 30W.

And the memory bandwidth numbers aren't particularly interesting. They're advertising 10.6GB/s on desktop Pentium 4 boards as well (see the I975X chipset, for example), and the AMD AM2 socket chips coming out this month will have a 12.8GB/sec memory controller on-die.

The memory bandwidth provided by AMD solutions also scales with the number of processors, since you're adding an additional memory controller per processor. There are boards on the market now - like the Tyan Thunder K8QW - which boast 51.2GB/s aggregate memory bandwidth.

And the reason for different models is because, unlike Intel processors which plug into a shared bus, Opterons are have dedicated Hypertraport links between the processors. There's three lines - 1xx which has a single link and is designed for uniprocessor configurations, 2xx which has two links and is designed for dual processor configurations, and 8xx which has three links and supports four and eight processor configurations. On current parts, the individual links at 8GB/sec, which means 8xx parts have 24GB/sec in aggregate bandwidth.

That's going to change some next year, though, when they move to Hypertransport 3 (current chips use 1), which scale to a whopping 41.6GB/sec per link.

AMD Comment

[HiyaPower]

AMD Issues Statement on Dell Decision to Offer Customers a
2006-05-18 16:36 (New York)

Choice

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2006
AMD (NYSE:AMD) released the following statement today
regarding the announcement Dell Inc. made in its quarterly earnings
statement that it intends to offer AMD Opteron(TM) Dual Core
processor-based servers.
      "We welcome Dell, and Dell customers, to the world of AMD64," said
Marty Seyer, AMD senior vice president, Commercial Business. "Dell is
a customer-focused company and we're pleased to see that they are
listening to their customers and providing them the choice of
innovative AMD products. We look forward to working closely with Dell
and bringing the benefits of AMD's leading performance-per-watt
solutions to Dell's customers.

AMD has sit on its laurels

[the_olo]

You can test it by yourself:

1) Go to http://www.amd.com/
2) Search for "Pacifica" (their upcoming enterprise technology for virtualization)
3) Click on the first link that their search engine returns ("AMD's Virtualization Solutions - Optimizing Enterprise Services")

You get a HTTP 404 error. It has been like this for two months now! What an embarrasment for their marketing dept...

And there's no mention of the estimated launch date of Pacifica processors anywhere on their site (or it's simply too hard to find). People are trying to make spending plans here and one can't get reliable information from AMD about one of its most important enterprise technologies planned for release this year!

They just look amateurish. Sad to say that, since they still have technological advantage over Intel and taking care of good marketing would seem to be a matter of some very simple steps.

Re:Wohoo

[Emetophobe]

My amd chip runs pretty cool anyway. I recently bought an Athlon64 X2 3800+ (2ghz dual core). It actually runs cooler than my nforce4 chipset under load (while playing games like oblivion). Of course I did replace the stock heatsink/fan with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro which has improved my cpu temperatures (paid $35 Canadian for the aftermarket cooler, and it's working amazing so far).

I'm running at stock speeds and voltages. Here are my temp readings while idle and after playing oblivion for 2 hours:

Idle: CPU: 30-33C Chipset: ~33C GPU: ~40C
Oblivion: CPU: 37-38C Chipset: 41-42C GPU: 50-56C

Of course, if I ran an instance of Prime95 torture test on each core, I would see cpu temperatures above 40C. But for what I use this computer for (gaming primarly), I never see the cpu go over 38C, which is pretty damn cool IMO (my old Dell P4 2.66ghz idles at 40C, higher than my load temps).