Two new efficient server chips are introduced, whilst new low-power APUs are said to be Intel ‘Bay Trail’ beaters.
Two new efficient server chips are introduced, whilst new low-power APUs are said to be Intel ‘Bay Trail’ beaters.
Although AMD have recently released their Kaveri APU, they’re also keen to ensure that the server market isn’t neglected despite the number of irons they currently have in the fire. With that in mind this past week they announced two new Opteron CPUs for servers based on their Piledriver architecture.
The Opteron 6338P and 6370P are designed primarily for enterprise workloads including heavy data analysis and database processing. They consist of two six-core or eight-core dies for a total of 12/16 cores and 12/16MB L2 cache respectively, and are compatible with G34 (LGA1944) platforms. Although like their “Abu Dhabi” predecessors “Warsaw” CPUs are built with Piledriver architecture, these new variants operate within a 99W power band and are expected to be more efficient on a perf/watt basis. Both new processors also feature 16MB L3 cache, support for up-to quad-channel 1866MHz DDR3 memory, and four 6.4GT/s HyperTransport links allowing 2P or 4P configurations.
Moving to the low-power APU side of their business, AMD have recently been revealing a little more information on their Mullins and Beema platforms. No release date has been fixed apart from a nebulous ‘this year’, but both the 10-25W Beema and ~2W Mullins parts are touted as extremely competitive versus Intel’s Bay Trail solution.
Both Beema and Mullins are SoCs intended for tablet and laptop mobile solutions, and should be significant improvements on Kabini and Temash thanks to use of updated 28nm “Puma” cores. Two or four Puma x86 cores are integral to these new parts, whilst AMD have also implemented support for Microsoft InstantGo and an AMD variant of the ARM TrustZone technology for greater data security.
In slides released at CES 2014 AMD revealed a performance improvement over comparable Bay Trail solutions by as much as 25% in PC Mark 8 and over 350% in 3DMark 11, the latter thanks mainly to the use of GCN-based graphics cores. Ignoring criticism over an absence of exact information on the AMD SKUs involved and the use of synthetic benchmarks, the results could be enough to see AMD capturing significant design wins for their new platforms. The new APUs are however only currently compatible with Windows 8.1, and it remains to be seen what sort of a impact not supporting x86-Android would have in the long-run.
Source: XBitLabs
