What’s a Newisys?

At AMD’s Opteron launch event on April 22, one key contributor to Opteron’s success was hardly mentioned. Newisys made Opteron a serious enterprise contender right out of the gate with a server design that matches or outguns the best dual-processor systems from major manufacturers.

On the face of it, all Austin, Texas-based startup Newisys did was create a motherboard, something that innumerable Taiwanese manufacturers do many times each quarter. But Newisys, an independent company funded in part by AMD, set itself a seemingly impossible goal: to take a first-generation 64-bit processor and chipset that no one had seen before and build an enterprise-grade server system. The target price for a working server had to be less than $3,000. And by the way, the system had to be completely bulletproof — not by PC-server standards, but by Unix-server standards.

The suggestion that AMD could hit the enterprise target on its first attempt made Intel executives laugh out loud. Intel believed it would have a green field on 64-bit technology for a minimum of two years while AMD worked the kinks out of its design.

Intel didn’t count on Newisys. This tiny company is stacked with stellar talent, led by CPU and server engineers from IBM. Newisys worked closely with AMD on Opteron’s design, identifying flaws and limitations in the CPU and chipset. That tight collaboration between AMD and the quality-obsessed, engineering-driven Newisys rapidly produced a fast, stable server design with something unique to entry-level servers: a PowerPC-based service processor. That processor knows everything about the state of your server and runs Linux in firmware.

Newisys doesn’t sell systems directly to customers. Server manufacturers buy the Newisys technology as a finished motherboard, as a packaged barebones server suitable for private branding, or as a package of design documents. Licensees will eventually be free to pick and choose the design elements they like. Until Opteron is better understood by manufacturers, licensees will probably buy motherboards and systems.