– John Fruehe, director of product marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD (www.amd.com), says:
If you look at the evolution of the data center in recent years, data centers continue to change rapidly. “Twin” form factors, which are two motherboards in one chassis, and high density modular form factors are becoming much more mainstream. These form factors are the “new blades” – a more cost effective way to address the need for increased density in a smaller physical footprint. This is critical because businesses today require more processing power than ever before, but they can’t always build a new datacenter to house additional servers. In addition, modular data centers, containerized data centers and even racks greater than 42U are all springing up as ways to address both density and efficiency. Greater density means greater power usage and cooling needs, so it is important to incorporate as may power-saving features into your data center as possible. This is why AMD offers processors with up to 12-cores in addition to processors with the world’s lowest per-core power draw: it’s all about achieving the perfect balance of price, power and performance.
We’r seeing a wide range of platforms targeted at cloud deployments. Modular form factors address computing from a thermal perspective rather than looking at raw performance and the same old vanilla form factors. Performance is important, but it’s still only one piece of the puzzle. These days, customers are demanding a balanced platform and OEMs are answering the call to action by providing a wide range of options.
We’ve seen a great reception from our OEM partners to the AMD Opteron 4000 Series and 6000 Series platforms introduced last year. Dell is one example of a manufacturer that is seeing demand for higher density; in February they launched the Dell PowerEdge C6145 which packs up to 96 cores into a 2U server.www.amd.com
