February 14th, 2005
AMD puts the 'hammer' down
Emboldened by a new partnership with blade maker Egenera, and by a wave of new AMD-based server offerings from HP, AMD has, at LinuxWorld, rolled out three new Opteron (formerly known as "Hammer") chips, a faster version of its HyperTransport interconnect technology, and enhanced SSE3 support. 
For the record, AMD proved me wrong. In the years leading up to Opteron’s release, I was certain that Intel would will Itanium to success much to the chagrin of AMD and its beloved 32/64-bit hybrid Opteron. But Opteron has overcome the odds. (Fans of AMD will argue that the odds were always in AMD’s favor.) Not resting on its laurels, AMD is keeping the heat on Intel (but keeping it off its new chips). In ZDNet’s IT Matters Podcast #11 (download the MP3, or learn how to have them automatically downloaded while you’re sleeping), I caught up with AMD’s vice president of commercial servers and workstations Ben Williams to get the skinny on his company’s new gear as well as a report card on how things are going with Opteron.
Tune into the podcast and you’ll get Williams’ answers to these and other questions:
- What is AMD announcing this week at LinuxWorld?
- Absent of Mhz and Ghz ratings for the chips, what sort of performance improvement is expected over the previous generation of chips?
- Will the boost in Hypertransport’s performance yield an overall increase in system performance above and beyond the gain from the chip improvements?
- What sort of applications will benefit from a speed-up of Hypertransport?
- What did the SSE3 instruction set do before the announcement, and what additional benefits are to be gained from the newly added instructions?
- What’s a specific example of an application that will benefit from SSE3?
- Do applications have to be rewritten to take advantage of the new instructions?
- Is SSE3 specific to AMD’s hardware?
- Why LinuxWorld, of all places, for making these announcements?
- How are things going with IBM?
- Anything new to report with Dell?
- How is Opteron fairing overall in the market?
- What enterprises are buying Opteron systems?
- Are these test sites, or are Opteron’s being used in production environments?
- What’s common to these installations? Mostly Linux? Are they Sun’s systems?
- Of the different vendors, who is moving the most Opteron boxes?
- Is Sun moving boatloads of systems?
- How many of Sun’s AMD systems are running Solaris?
- How come Sun’s AMD-based workstations are so outrageously expensive?
- Should we expect to see more of AMD’s products in enterprise-class desktop systems from the major vendors?
- What about frig-sized systems–how does Opteron scale above 8 processors?
- Did the prices on the previous generation of chips (150, 250, and 850) come down?
- How are things going on the gaming front with 64-bit class systems?
Williams was sharp as a tack. I wish other interviewees knew their business as well as he did.
