HP opts for Opterons for new blades, workstations

By Steve Malone

Posted on 15 Feb 2005 at 09:45

Hewlett Packard has formed a major partnership with AMD. The chipmakers new range of Opterons will be providing the next generation of chips for HP x86 products across a whole range of business machines.

HP has announced that a new range of blade servers and workstations will be based around the AMD Opteron. The company also announced a new range of Opteron based Proliant servers which remain the biggest selling x86 based servers in the world. HP already launched a range of Opteron based Proliants last year.

`This is a great day,` said Marty Seyer, AMD's VP and General Manager of Microprocessors. `For a long time we have wanted to partner with a tier one manufacturer and now this partnership with HP will project us into the mainstream.`

Although still a niche product - albeit a growing one - the biggest breakthrough for AMD will be the announcement of the Proliant BL25p and BL35p BladeSystems. One of the biggest headaches for any rack based server and the densely packed blade servers in particular is heat. With heat consumption of just 95 Watts - considerably less than that used by the equivalent Intel Xeon processors, HP claims that customers can stack far more Opteron based blade servers than Intel ones.

Furthermore, AMD's PowerNow power management system means that power can be matched to CPU usage so that an idle processor can use only 33 per cent of the power and generate less heat. It saves on the electricity bills and air conditioning too. HP is claiming you can stack around 20 per cent more Opteron based blade servers in the same space than equivalent Intel based devices.

However, HP emphasises that it isn't planning to abandon the Intel platform for its servers anytime soon - in fact amongst all the announcements made yesterday are several new Intel based Proliants. Rather, the company says it is 'Chip-nostic' inasmuch as it says that its range of management software will run happily on chips from either vendor.

Nonetheless, HP is already looking forward to adding dual core processors to the Opteron based servers when they become available this year. According to HP, the existing motherboards will accommodate the dual core designs without further modification. Whilst dual core is unlikely to actually double performance, HP reckons that it will give a significant advantage especially against offerings from arch rival Dell which remains the last Intel only stronghold.

HP is late to the party for Opteron based workstations with both Sun and IBM already having offerings in the market. However, HP has tried to make best use of its second mover advantage by adding more modern technology. The xw9300 is a dual processor with a dual PCI Express bus offering x16 graphics speed. This, HP says, is in contrast to the AGP8 graphics busses used in the current IBM and Sun offerings. The machine also boasts the NVidia nForce 4 chipset which, as any of today's gamers will tell you means SLI, a method by which NVidia can user multiple GPUs to - among other things - accelerate 3D graphics.

The workstation also features integrated SATA II which, HP says doubles the speed of the disk I/O.

Apparently, this combination has impressed movie studio Dreamworks - the studio behind the Shrek blockbusters - to the extent that it plans to base the next generation of CGI movies on HP workstations.

For HP, the AMD connection allows the troubled technology vendor to put some clear water between it and its rivals in some of the key low volume high margin areas it needs to succeed in. It also gives HP a clear roadmap for its product line as it goes towards a multicore future. For AMD it finally gets the blue chip credibility its been after. And with a major vendor in its camp, AMD expects to see a big jump in Opteron's market share in the coming year.