AMD Financial Analyst Day 2008

Server Processor Roadmap

Currently, server processors from AMD, their sales and market reception, have a great deal of disparity with AMD's client processors. Given the situation, this is beneficial to AMD. While Barcelona-derived client processors haven't had the kind of market reception expected, owing to what the architecture itself promised and ended up delivering, the server-grade Opteron series has had a fair bit of success owing to the great technological backing of the processors, by AMD's virtualization technology and the levels of scalability, expandability, and efficiency current Opteron processors offer. While AMD plans to step up the momentum, in the process, it hopes to reduce the level of disparity between the two computing models by making sure client processors are well received, while server processors are taken to a level further up.

AMD studied the key forces acting on large scale computing pools such as data-centers, and charted out its strategy to address the market:



The company plans to address the market in the near future, with two essential routes of server processor development: the front-runner longevity route, and economical flexibility route.

• Existing platform get access to the next generation processor technology for quick and economical expansion.
• Future platforms get best advantages of the next generation processor technologies

For example, the current Barcelona-supportive platform will have seamless access to Shanghai technology, while Shanghai will also have its own advanced platform codenamed Fiorano, which enhances virtualization by means of broad core-logic and peer-to-peer processor interconnections, bringing out the best Shanghai core Opterons have to offer. Likewise, AMD's upcoming 6-core "Istanbul" processor will have access to both platforms on the same basis. DDR3 memory brings in constraints relating to the memory controllers existing processors come with, and hence is an isolated platform codenamed "Maranello", with DDR3 supportive "Magny-Cours" and "Sao-Paulo" processors, though the same model of flexibility would be carried on with its succeeding processor and platform. AMD also provides short notes on just how much of a difference Shanghai plans to bring to existing platforms, and presents a list of existing industry clients for AMD's server processors, and their solutions based on AMD technologies.