AMD brings dual-core Opteron to data center

The move to put more processing punch into low-cost, standards-based systems has kicked into high gear with HP, IBM and Sun announcing that systems built on dual-core Opteron processors will ship over the next two months.

The announcements came at an event last week at which AMD celebrated the second anniversary of its popular 32-/64-bit chip with the unveiling of a new design that puts two processing engines, or cores, on one piece of silicon. AMD and Intel last year announced that they were transitioning to a multicore design as a way to get around heat and power issues that come with faster-processing chips.

Instead of increasing clock speed, two lower-power cores that can share processing tasks are placed on one chip. The idea isn't new: IBM's Power chip has been dual-core since 2001, and Sun and HP last year rolled out dual-core RISC processors. What's new is bringing this type of technology enhancement to x86-based systems.

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The move to put more processing punch into low-cost, standards-based systems has kicked into high gear with HP, IBM and Sun announcing that systems built on dual-core Opteron processors will ship over the next two months.

The announcements came at an event last week at which AMD celebrated the second anniversary of its popular 32-/64-bit chip with the unveiling of a new design that puts two processing engines, or cores, on one piece of silicon. AMD and Intel last year announced that they were transitioning to a multicore design as a way to get around heat and power issues that come with faster-processing chips.

Instead of increasing clock speed, two lower-power cores that can share processing tasks are placed on one chip. The idea isn't new: IBM's Power chip has been dual-core since 2001, and Sun and HP last year rolled out dual-core RISC processors. What's new is bringing this type of technology enhancement to x86-based systems.

Intel last week began shipping its first dual-core processor, the 3.2-GHz Pentium Extreme Edition for desktops. However, dual-core Xeons aren't expected to ship until early in 2006.

That leaves customers with one choice when it comes to dual-core x86-based servers - for now. Analysts note that while most data center applications are multithreaded, and as a result will see performance improvements on the dual-core boxes, there is no rush to bring in the systems.

Issues remain. Software licensing, for example, is still up in the air, with some vendors, such as Oracle, counting each core on a multicore processor as a CPU and others, such as Microsoft, charging by the socket. IBM last week said it would regard dual-core x86 processors as single CPUs when pricing software. It charges per core for its dual-core Power platforms.

"With first-generation x86 dual core . . . the performance bumps will be incremental at first, so we are pricing them as if they were a single processor," an IBM spokesman says.

"It's not going to be ideal for everything, and certainly single-core chips are going to continue to be available," says Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata. "For workloads that are multithreaded, a dual core is going to give more performance. Whether it gives more bang for the buck - customers are going to have to do benchmarks. They're going to have to look at pricing. Pricing that has been reported for these chips does indicate that there is going to be somewhat of a price premium associated with this."

HP and Sun are the only vendors with a broad Opteron-based portfolio, which also puts a limitation on how widely the dual-core Opterons will be adopted, notes John Enck, vice president of server strategies at Gartner.

Kevin Kish, technical team lead at Spartech, a plastics manufacturer in St. Louis, is looking at Sun's Opteron-based v20z and v40z for test and development environments. He says he could save thousands of dollars by moving an Oracle test and development environment off a more expensive SPARC-based box.

"Dual core will allow us to run more systems on a server," he says. "On the [Sun Fire] E6900 we have four installs of Oracle 11i on one four-processor board. That's a lot of stuff going on."