AMD Ships First "Bulldozer" Processors to Big Super Installations

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Despite recent rumors of delays, today AMD announced revenue shipments of the first processors based on its new x86 “Bulldozer” architecture. Initial production of the world’s first 16-core x86 processor, codenamed “Interlagos,” began in August and shipping to customers is already underway. Compatible with existing AMD Opteron 6100 Series platforms, Interlagos is expected to launch and be available in partner systems in the fourth quarter of this year. Many of the initial shipments have been earmarked for large custom supercomputer installations that are now underway.

Here, KY Wong (left) and Marshall Kwait (right) pass the first set of Interlagos processors to Joe Fitzgerald of Cray. Earlier this year, Cray announced that a number of customers with Cray XE6 supercomputers will update their systems with Interlagos processors. The processors in the picture above are most likely destined for one of those massive systems that will be used for supercomputing tasks like weather modeling or energy research. Such customers as CSCS – the Swiss National Supercomputer Center, and the University of Edinburgh have all signed up to upgrade their Cray XE6 supercomputers for their research needs.

Read the Full Story.

Comments

  1. Rich,

    Any chance of contacting CSCS, EPCC or ORNL and getting some benchmark results from them? It doesn’t quite seem fair to call Interlagos a 16 ‘core’ chip when it’s 8 modules, each with 2 integer cores and a unified double-wide FPU. How that translates into performance in scientific applications seems unclear to me, since so much will depend on scheduling. Integer performance will, I assume, be pretty damn good, but that’s hardly the rate limiting step in most physics-based computational models.

    I’m sure these places(*) didn’t buy without some early access to hardware and indications of expected gains, and SPEC.org doesn’t seem to have the CPU2006 fp/fp_rate test results yet, which is a bit worrying. InsideHPC would surely be doing well to have some data, right? 🙂

    (*) ORNL’s is, I believe, mostly a ‘host’ platform for the Tesla boards, at least in so far as FPU performance is concerned. But I don’t think the EPCC and CSCS installs are GPU-based systems, are they?

  2. Is it a god idea to be showng Buldozer in front of a “BEWARE OF LOW HEADROOM” warning?