Interview: AMD's John Fruehe on Bulldozer's Power Saving Features

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This week Joe Casad interviewed John Fruehe, AMD’s Director of Product Marketing, about the Bulldozer line of 16-core processors. One thing I found interesting was Bulldozer’s new TDP Power Cap.

TDP Power Cap lets you set a custom TDP (power limit) for the processor. Many customers are trying to optimize their data centers and get the best density possible. Since they have a predefined power budgets per rack, TDP power capping allows a customer to take the TDP down a bit, freeing up some of that power headroom so that they can maximize space in their rack. A good example was a customer I met with in Europe. They had power budgets for the rack, and always ran out of power first, so they had 3-5 slots free at the top of the rack. With TDP Power Cap, they can reduce the TDP, allowing them to populate the extra slots at the top of the rack, which allowed them to reduce the number of total racks grow their server count without taking up more floor space.

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