John Fruehe, director of marketing for AMD's server, embedded and FireStream products, recently visited Japan and was asked in the communication with customers about the new core plan for the next year, and whether he would consider bringing the new Bobcat architecture to the server space. Unlike high-performance bulldozers, the Lynx is a new core designed for low-power applications. The APU processor based on this architecture plus GPU graphics core consumes only 9W or 18W of thermal design power. Each core is averaged. 4.5W or 9W, it looks very suitable for data center cloud computing, but in fact AMD now has ultra-low-power Opteron servers, such as the six-core Opteron 4100 EE series, the average power consumption of the lowest 32W, a single core is only 5.33W, The 12-core Opteron 6100 HE series can also achieve an average power consumption of 65W and a single core of 5.41W.
And in addition to power consumption, cloud computing customers also need real server features and lower management costs. This is what the Bobcats architecture lacks. It does not support technologies such as ECC memory, large-capacity caches, and server operating systems. It is also designed for single-processor systems like Intel Atom, and it cannot achieve the required core density, which in turn affects overall management. Although there are vendors who use the Atom processor in the server space, they can only be regarded as an attempt and cannot be promoted. The Bobcats also face the same problem.
AMD said it will continue to evaluate the appropriate product roadmap and analyze the possibility of using bulldozers and Bobcat architectures for cloud server SoC chips, but it is still not 100% committed.
Opteron 6200/4200 series processors based on bulldozer architecture will be released in the third quarter of 2011 for single, dual, and four-socket server markets, and will bring a new 32nm process.