AMD lays down a green chip in Barcelona

Company bets on extreme efficiency with Barcelona — that’s textbook green advancement

For all the facts and features I’ve absorbed in my briefings about Barcelona — including a video interview with the company’s director of server operations Bruce Shaw — one stands out most for me: The chip delivers more than twice the combined integer and floating-point performance of its two-core predecessor at the same thermal envelope, according to AMD’s SPEC tests. That’s to say, despite the power boost, it effectively uses the same amount of energy and produces the same amount of heat as a two-core. One of the ways AMD accomplishes this feat: The cores are capable of powering down, or off, when they’re not being used.

That, to me, is a textbook example of a green technological advancement. It means AMD has minted a processor with significantly higher performance per watt than its predecessor, a metric that’s becoming increasingly important to datacenter operators compared to just raw speed. It would be like a car company unveiling an engine with twice the horsepower but the same gas mileage.

But Barcelona’s green promise doesn’t end there: Consider, also, that AMD designs its chips such that you can easily swap out an old one — in this case, a two-core Opteron — pop in a new four-quad, tweak the BIOS, and poof, you’ve got an upgraded machine. Not only is that a significant time-saver for upgrading your machines, but it means you can essentially double the overall processing power of your server farm without having to recycle or dispose of a single piece of otherwise-useful hardware. Therein lies another ecofriendly boon.

Rounding out the array of Barcelona’s green-tech benefits: It’s primed for virtualization. According to Shaw, AMD worked closely with the major virtualization vendors, including Microsoft, VMWare, and Xen to hone and accelerate the quad-core’s virtualization capabilities. For example, the chip has a new feature called Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which, according to AMD, transfers to the chip some of the virtualization functionality previous performed by the software. The payoff: AMD claims the chip can deliver 79 percent more virtual machines that can its fastest dual-core processor. (That’s a very conservative estimate, Shaw notes.)

Now, if the numbers AMD is sharing are correct, there’s cause indeed for excitement for datacenter operators who are feeling the pressure of limited datacenter space and high energy bills. When you combine the performance boost of the chip alone and add in the virtualization boost, you’re looking at a ton of potential to get far more work out of your machines.

There’s a lot more to Barcelona, and I suggest you not only watch my video interview with Shaw but also check out Tom Yager’s analysis. He’s been immersed in information about the chip for quite some time now, plus he’s testing it to see if it’s all that AMD claims. (He’s also put together a comparison of Intel’s and AMD’s respective four-quad CPUs right here.)

AMD has suffered some financial difficulty recently, and some analysts suggest that Barcelona is coming to the table too late to give the chipmaker the boost it needs. From my green-tech perspective, though, AMD appears to have created a piece of silicon that is very, very well suited for a day and age in which companies are becoming highly conscientious of their power consumption and limited datacenter space (not to mention their carbon footprints). This is an important piece of green technology, one that certainly warrants at least a close look from the enterprise.