AMD's SeaMicro unveils servers... running Intel

 

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By Reuters and Nicole Kobie

Posted on 11 Sep 2012 at 09:43

AMD unveiled an energy-efficient server platform aimed at cloud computing, the first major fruit of its acquisition of SeaMicro this year as the chipmaker struggles to diversify beyond a stagnant PC industry.

The new technology, which runs processors made by AMD as well as Intel, has more bandwidth while using less electricity than previous products, Andrew Feldman, formerly CEO of SeaMicro and now at AMD, said.

The SeaMicro SM15000 system is available today running Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, and in November will arrive running Ivy Bridge and AMD's "Piledriver" Opteron.

This approach provides the benefits typically provided by expensive and complex solutions such as network-attached storage and storage area networking with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage

The micro servers use a quarter of the power of alternatives, AMD claimed, but offer 16 times the bandwidth of "best-in-class" alternatives. They feature SeaMicro's Freedom Fabric Storage, which allows the chassis to connect directly to disk arrays, allowing "a single ten rack unit system to support more than five petabytes of low-cost, easy-to-install storage," AMD said.

"Once these disks are interconnected with the fabric, they are seen and shared by all servers in the system," the company explained. "This approach provides the benefits typically provided by expensive and complex solutions such as network-attached storage and storage area networking with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage."

SeaMicro acquisition

AMD bought Silicon Valley startup SeaMicro in March for $334 million to gain a foothold in smaller, lower-power computer servers, a potential area of growth as internet services expand and corporations look to save on electricity bills.

Its focus on low-power servers comes as ARM, whose energy-efficient technology has become ubiquitous in smartphones and tablets, turns its attention to data centers, an area traditionally dominated by powerful "x86" chips made by AMD and Intel.

AMD and Intel are both rushing to expand beyond their traditional PC market as consumers increasingly turn to tablets and smartphones.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing - where data and applications are stored on or hosted on remote computers via the internet - is driving worldwide server demand.

AMD plans to market its chip technology along with SeaMicro's platforms to its corporate partners: Hewlett Packard, Dell and IBM. It has said the platforms consume a quarter of the power and take up a sixth of the space of the typical servers that make up the massive "farms" that corporations now maintain.