John Fruehe of AMD delivers a keynote presentation
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — One of the morning keynote session on Wednesday was delivered by John Fruehe of AMD, who addressed “core scalability in a cloud environment.”
He says AMD processors are involved in a tremendous number of cloud deployments, partly because the company was first to focus on power efficiency.
AMD has an Opteron 4000 chip model, for which performance can be adjusted down to fine tune power consumption.
He says people working in the “mega data center” space are very focused on efficiency, making calculations based on revenue per square foot, or even per watt.
The cloud opens up opportunity because the technological complexity of the infrastructure is an incentive for people to outsource.
What the cloud demands, he says, is more processor cores, but also greater power efficiency. Customers are using, even in the consumer space, more and more cores.
The density of hosting operations is much greater than traditional data centers, with more and more cores (up to 128) in a single 2U chassis.
There continue to be different server configurations best-suited to specific environments, such as dedicated hosting, cloud front-end and virtualized hosting.
AMD, he says, is moving toward a smaller transistor, which increases power efficiency and performance-per-watt. Cores are becoming better and more efficient, he says.
AMD has also created a module called “bulldozer” that enables programs to share processors and other resources, which enables those resources to be shared more efficiently. It represents an idea he calls “straight through computing,” through which AMD intends to deliver computing with dedicated resources for each integer thread.
The CPU, he says, is the biggest contributor to power consumption of a given machine, consuming about 50 percent of power, on average.
One of the immediate future advances for CPUs, he says, will be the ability to power off CPUs entirely, rather than putting them in a low-power state, when they aren’t being used.
And AMD is focused on power efficiency more than anything else (more than peak performance) beause that’s what data center operators say is most important to them.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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