The Case for AMD’s Opteron in the Data Center

AMD today announced its latest round of quad-core Opteron chips, the processors formerly known as Barcelona. The new chips, called SE, are the highest performing Opterons; tests have shown them to run about eight percent faster than others in the Opteron line. Servers encasing these chips should start rolling out within the month: Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM have all committed to Opteron-based servers. (Sun’s new Sparc servers are already based on Opteron chips.)

One reason to think about the Opteron: according to Kishna Weaver, Opteron product manager, firms that upgrade from dual-core to quad-core servers can expect to see a 60 to 70 percent performance improvement, on average.

But why should Wall Street IT executives choose AMD’s quad-core versus Intel’s quad-core processor? Weaver offers some reasons:

First is AMD’s hardware-assisted virtualization, AMD-V. Although Intel has also introduced hardware-assisted virtualization, according to Weaver AMD’s has a few unique features. One is a “device exclusion vector,” built-in security in the form of a table that allows you to know which virtual machine is using which areas of memory, to protect it from an unauthorized virtual machine trying to use it.

A second AMD-specific virtualization feature is called Tagged TLB (TLB stands for Translation Look-aside Buffer). This is a table in the CPU that stores recently used virtual-to-physical memory translations – “tagged” means the data understands which virtual machine owns it. This provides faster access to certain data stored in memory for virtual machines.

A recently added AMD virtualization feature is rapid virtualization indexing (RVI), which takes some memory mapping formerly performed by hypervisor software and gives it to the chip hardware, enabling “faster, near native speeds,” according to Weaver.

Besides the virtualization features, Weaver says the Opteron chips are energy efficient and that the overall total cost of ownership, scalability and manageability of AMD processors is superior because new and old processors are compatible.