HPCwire comments: AMD's new Opterons

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There is lots of news about AMD’s new Shanghai processors (details on AMD’s own site), so in addition to vectoring you that way (for example, The Register) I’ll point you to Michael Feldman’s comments at HPCwire. Michael comments on the launch itself

AMD logoThe new chips include five energy-sipping HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1 to 2.3 GHz, and which draw just 55 watts. The company also released two new high performance SE processors at 2.8 GHz, consuming 105 watts. The new chips come in both two-socket and multi-socket (four- and eight-socket) flavors and can be plugged into existing motherboards with just a BIOS upgrade.

And then on some of the things that set this one apart, including the new focus on lowering power consumption

Maybe all this power pinching is not for the traditional high performance computing crowd. The big targets for low-power CPUs are cloud computing, Web hosting and other mainstream datacenter applications. Even so, HPC workloads that are highly scalable, core-wise, can often take advantage of setups with larger numbers of slower processors to get the needed performance. Of course, as systems grow to tens of thousands of cores and beyond, energy-efficient computing is no longer optional.

A recommended quick read.