AMD Evolving Fast to Survive in the Server Market Jungle
by Johan De Gelas on June 18, 2013 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- CPUs
- Arm
- Enterprise
Seattle: The Atom Killer?
The chip that has the potential to give Intel some real headaches is “Seattle”. It is a pretty revolutionary design for being an AMD CPU. No less than 8 or 16 ARM Cortex A57 are inside this new AMD lower power server SoC. The 28 nm SoC also integrates a 10Gbe controller, a SATA controller (high port count), encryption and compression module. But the real kicker is that this SoC will integrate some of the best Seamicro technology such as TIO (Turn It Off, reducing power by shutting down unnecessary interfaces) and the high performance Seamicro Freedom Fabric.
Single threaded performance will be similar to the Opteron X1150, but throughput should up to 4 times higher. There is little doubt in our minds that this might well be one of the best micro server CPU of 2014 (based upon the paper specs). It looks like the Intel Avoton will have a very potent challenger in Q1 2014.
Better Piledriver
It is clear that the micro server market gets the lion's share of AMD’s attention. However, the current piledriver based Opteron 6300 gets a small facelift in Q1 of 2014. Apparantly both the core and uncore have received quite a few minor tweaks, resulting in lower TDPs and a better performance/watt. This CPU with 12 or 16 “Piledriver Enhanced” cores is called “Warsaw”.
Conclusion
The Opteron-X, Opteron 6300 and “Berlin” CPU will all face stiff competition from the Intel alternatives. The integrated GPU of Berlin will make it very attractive for the HPC market, but it looks like Intel will probably have the upper hand in most of the traditional server markets.
However, the combined AMD, ARM and Seamicro technology inside AMD’s new Seattle CPU look extremely promising: these are probably the best specs of a micro server CPU we have seen so far. And since all the right components are now in place, it looks like the micro server is ready for prime time. There is little doubt that Seamicro servers will continue to thrive in their niche market while HP's Moonshot and Dell's Viking will make the market much more popular. So there is good chance that AMD will make a big comeback in 2014 in the server market.
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JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
thx. fixed :-)Denithor - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
"It is clear that the micro server market gets the lionshare of AMD’s attention."lion's share
"While the Opteron-X, Opteron 6300 and “Berlin” CPU will all face stiff completion from the Intel alternatives."
competition
"but it looks like Intel will probably have the upperhand in most traditional server markets."
upper hand
Wow, did you guys not edit this piece before going live?
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
To be honest, I wrongly assumed that I still had some time left, then discovered that the deadline was already a few hours ago and just hurried. So I humbly thank you for making this article more readable for our readers :-)JDG1980 - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
I'm hoping we will see some relatively inexpensive Mini-ITX Kyoto boards. An Opteron-X paired with ECC RAM could make a good, reliable platform for a DIY firewall or low-end NAS.iwod - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
I didn't known the 9W for X1150 was for 1Ghz Core. If so i guess Intel will have Zero competition for Atom Servers. Intel will want to get as much market shares between now to end of 2014 when ARM will have a low power server product. Seattle seems interesting, I wonder if it is possible to have 4x 16 Core Seattle in a server. Seems like a good candidate for Hosting environment.SuperMecha - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
Remember that the X1150 has 4 cores vs the 2 for the Atom chip. It also has much better IPC and support for ECC and 32GB (DDR3-1600) of RAM vs only 8GB (DDR3-1333) for the S1260.JDG1980 - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
The Centertron (S1200-series) Atoms already have ECC support. But the performance is still subpar, so AMD will have an advantage there. Also, as far as I have been able to determine, there is only one Centertron board available to DIYers (the Supermicro X9SBAA-F) and it's hard to find and quite pricey (>$250). If AMD could get Mini-ITX Kyoto boards out at the $150-$200 price point, this would be a quite attractive option for small servers.iwod - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
So how would next Gen Intel Arch compared to Jaguar? Since Intel has ( I think ) Hyper Threading in their Next Gen as well, so a Dual Core isn't so far off from Quad Core, And it seems Intel can ups the Ghz a bit more then the X1150.I would love to see some comparison done.
milli - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link
"Berlin will use the same 28 nm process technology as the Opteron x1150 and x2150"Jaguar is made at TSMC.
Rumors for Steamroller derived processors point to production at Globalfoundries. Most go as far as claiming that it will be FD-SOI (see STMicroelectronics). That makes sense because 28nm bulk would be a step back compared to 32nm SOI. I don't think AMD is going to stop using SOI for their high-end CPU's anytime soon.
Either way, be sure that they won't be using the same process technology (even though they're both 28nm) for these very different CPU's.
rocketbuddha - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Please...AMD specifically said in the DEC 2012 WSA amendment with Global Foundries. It is in Page 6 of the 11 Page PDF titles
<quote>
Separately, AMD will move to standard 28nm process technology and significantly reduce reimbursements to GF for future research and development costs.
–
We anticipate these savings will be approximately ~$20M per quarter during the next several years which also helps achieve our OPEX target of $450M by Q3 2013
<end quote>
Read again and again. The standard technology at 28nm is Bulk HKMG. not SOI.
Even GF's powerpoint roadmap states that the 20nm as well as 14XM process will both be successors to 28nm Bulk HKMG will continue to be Bulk HKMG and bulk with FinFETs respectively. And the SOI line stops with 28nm FD-SOI (in collaboration with STM) and just a ambiguous dotted line for the future.
With FDSOI we still do not know if GF has agreed to manufacture FDSOI parts in large volume. All we know is the license agreement between ST Micro and GF.