AMD CPUs sip energy; Intel green with envy

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches AMD go green with new, low power, 45nm Opteron CPUs. Not to mention The Benny Hill-ifier...

Patrick Thibodeau reports:

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is adding a new, low-power Opteron processor to its Shanghai line road map and plans to release the chip in the second quarter of the year. AMD said the need for lower-power chips is being driven, in part, by the rise of cloud computing centers, the massive data centers being built by the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. to deliver computing services.

However, AMD isn't saying just yet how much power usage it can cut in the upcoming 45-nanometer, quad-core chip line below the 55 watts used by its low-power processor released today. AMD revealed its plans for the fourth chip as part of the release of two new processors ... These chips succeed similar offerings in the 65nm Barcelona line of processors.

Timothy Prickett-Morgan adds:

AMD has ramped up its 45 nanometer chip making process, delivering lower-voltage and higher-clock-speed variants of its "Shanghai" Opteron processors. These Shanghai chips are coming to market just when AMD said they would, representing a tiny bit of good news in a twelve-month cycle that has been pretty hard on AMD, its partners, and its shareholders.

There are five so-called Highly Efficient variants of the Shanghai Opterons arriving today ... Each of the four cores on the chip has 512 KB of L2 cache memory and the cores share a 6 MB L3 cache (which is three times the cache on the earlier and buggy Barcelona quad-core Opterons that gave AMD grief a year ago). The chips also support 800 MHz DDR2 main memory ... These parts run at slightly lower clock speeds, but they have dramatically lower power consumption. Each is rated at 55 watts using AMD's own ACP scale.

Joel Hruska explains:

ACP, or average chip power, is a standard AMD introduced when it launched Barcelona in the fall of 2007. A processor's ACP value is meant to be a much more accurate reference point when comparing processor power consumption; AMD now promotes ACP over TDP when it refers to its processors' power draw.

ACP was meant to close (or at least reduce) the known chasm between how Intel and AMD measure TDP ... [and] are calculated based on power consumption in a series of benchmarks, described as including "floating point, integer, java, Web, memory bandwidth, and transactional workloads" ... AMD also notes that it measures ACP conservatively, and deliberately chooses parts that run slightly hotter-than-average when measuring ACP for any given processor series.

Dean Takahashi waxes metaphorical:

The tennis match continues. Advanced Micro Devices and Intel are in a duel for the top performance in microprocessors. Today, AMD is taking a swing with the launch of its new series of server processors for high-end computers and Internet servers.
...
Intel’s lowest power Xeon server processor is the Xeon i5420. The Intel chips run as high as 3.2 gigahertz, but the AMD chips are essentially just as fast, despite maxing out at 2.8 gigahertz. That’s because the AMD chips can get more work done during the tick of a clock than an Intel chip ... [They] will make AMD competitive against the best of Intel’s line-up. But it remains to be seen if that’s going to help AMD, which has lost money for nine quarters in a row, get back to profitability.

Sylvie Barak inquires:

AMD claims the new petite power processors can also offer up to 20 per cent lower idle power when compared to similarly configured competing systems, and come with improved power management capabilities to boot. Rackable Systems will purportedly have Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processor-based servers ready for immediate release with other OEMs expected to follow suit later on in the quarter.
...
The release of these seven shiny new Opteron processors comes just as both AMD and Intel have admitted the credit crunch is forcing them to cut back on buying hardware such as PCs and server systems. OEMs have responded by slashing production, leaving the chipmakers with massive processor backlogs and gluts in their sales channels, which both are attempting to solve with well timed price cuts.

Krishnan Subramanian reminds us why it matters:

With the increased adaption of Cloud Computing in both consumer and enterprise segments, the datacenter needs are increasing drastically. This, in turn, is driving up the electricity consumed by datacenters dramatically. The datacenters in the US alone consumed 61 Billion kWh of electricity in 2006. This is roughly 1.5% of all the electricity consumption in the US during the year 2006 and double that of 2000.
...
Sensing a huge opportunity, AMD is positioning itself to capture the market .../ There is a clear trend towards increasing the density of components in the servers and datacenters, thereby, reducing their power consumption. The release of this processor helps achieve this more easily. With the latest trends towards container based datacenters, the need for low power, high performance processors like AMD’s Shanghai HE processors only increases further and further.

And finally...

• Benny Hillifier [hat tip: Bill Corbett]

Buffer overflow:

• Locutus: Are you an "average" user?
• Stacey Higginbotham: Verizon's Femtocell Is Pretty Lame
• Bobbie Johnson: How can Google cope with Twitter pollution?
• Todd Bishop: McNealy has Obama's ear on open source, countering Microsoft spin
• Coding Horror: A Scripter at Heart
• Luis Suarez: IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights
• 9 to 5 Mac: Another Mac Trojan found in torrented Adobe CS4 crack
• Dave Winer: What made the Mac different
• Todd Bishop: Microsoft's score against Apple: Zune $85 million, iPod $3.4 billion

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Seth Weintraub: Why does Apple treat Steve Jobs' health like a new product?
• Eric Lundquist: Technology topics we should, but won't, hear at Davos
• Mike Elgan: Netbooks killing PC and notebook sales? It's a myth.
• SJVN: What do KDE 4.2 and Windows 7 have in common?
• Dan Tynan: Social media search: A stalker's paradise?
• Douglas Schweitzer: Spreading malware the old fashioned way!
• Michael R. Farnum: A 14-year-old social engineers the police
• Eric Lundquist: Business computing in 2009: cheap, virtual and on the browser
• Preston Gralla: More reasons netbooks are killing Microsoft
• Mark Everett Hall: Cloud programming will rule app dev's future
• Shark Tank: The $6,000 lunch
• Shark Bait: Remember When...

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• That's a Monster of a data breach
• Microsoft lays off 5K employees; saves $1.5bn
• US-CERT naysays Microsoft security advisory