AmdOpteron6200
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University gets $188 million AMD-based supercomputer, free copy of Norton
It used to be that you only needed a bachelor's degree and elbow patches to be taken seriously as an academic, but now it's all about that 50-petaflop supercomputer with 500 petabytes of storage whirring away in the basement. The University of Illinois used to shop with IBM, but it's just about to have a brand new Cray XK6 installed instead, so it can continue providing computing power to the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. It's not all about inciting gadget envy, of course: the machine's unlikely truce of AMD Opteron 6200 16-core processors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs will help more than 25 teams of scientists to model and understand real-world phenomena, from the damage caused by earthquakes to the way viruses to break into cells. Breakthroughs from these projects will -- hopefully, one day -- make the $188 million total cost of Cray's products and services seem like a bargain. Full details in the PR after the break.
AMD ships '16-core' Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200
We seem to have mislaid our definition of fashionably late -- a fortnight after the promised "October" launch, systems packing AMD's Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200 (formerly Interlagos) will commence shipping to enterprise customers. If you haven't been paying too much attention, you might just believe the claim about it having 16 cores -- Bulldozer's architecture has eight two-core modules rather than 16 independent ones. Despite the short delay and the conspicuous claims, the company reckons it's 84 percent faster, 73 percent more efficient and uses half the power of the equivalent Intel Xeon. At the same time, Sunnyvale firmed up news on the Valencia (Opteron 4200) and announced 2012's Opteron 3000 platform with the new Zurich chip -- designed to run on low-power web hosts. Enterprise customers can read the PR we've got after the break and then begin placing orders; the rest of us will have to keep waiting to see if Andre Yang can push his FX all the way to 9GHz.[Thanks, Khan]
AMD ships 16-core Bulldozer chips for servers, makes consumers wait their turn
AMD's Interlagos, its server-styled Bulldozer chip -- Mr. Opteron 6200 to you and me -- is being pushed out to retailers and OEMs ready for an October launch. AMD is calling it the first 16-core x86 processor, although as we know from the required reading, it has eight two-core shared modules rather than 16 independent ones. The chips are compatible with Socket G34 motherboards, but most of this first production run will go straight into supercomputer projects. AMD remains mute on progress of the consumer-level Zambezi, but rumors are that the company can't clock it fast enough to compete with Intel's Core i7 -- the very class that Bulldozer was designed to bury. [Thanks, Sebastian]
