seamicro | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:40:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png seamicro | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 AMD to focus on high-performance server CPUs, abandons SeaMicro https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-to-focus-on-high-performance-server-cpus-abandons-seamicro/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-to-focus-on-high-performance-server-cpus-abandons-seamicro/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2015 23:27:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=245486 Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday said that as a part of the strategy to simplify and sharpen the company’s investment focus, AMD would exist the micro-server systems business, which was formerly known as SeaMicro. The company will retain SeaMicro’s Freedom fabric and other intellectual property, but will cease to invest in development of dense servers. …

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Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday said that as a part of the strategy to simplify and sharpen the company’s investment focus, AMD would exist the micro-server systems business, which was formerly known as SeaMicro. The company will retain SeaMicro’s Freedom fabric and other intellectual property, but will cease to invest in development of dense servers. Instead, it will focus on high-performance server CPUs.

When AMD acquired SeaMicro for $334 million in early 2012, it was a rather bold move since the company was not making any money back then and the market of micro-servers was not something significant as well. SeaMicro was known for its Intel Atom and low-power Xeon-based servers and had Freedom fabric, a technology that simplifies building ultra-dense servers. Back then it seemed that SeaMicro had a lot of prospects, but since the market of micro-servers has never really taken off and AMD has not introduced a single new SeaMicro product in three years, sales of its dense servers dropped dramatically in the recent quarters.

amd_seamicro_announcement

Since SeaMicro did not bring AMD any significant money, but still had operational and R&D costs, the chip designer decided that it was time to abandon the business unit. The latter was not sold to another company and was not spun off, AMD simply decided to shut SeaMicro down, but to retain its intellectual property, which may be used eventually for the company’s platforms for various servers.

“At the corporate level, we continue aligning larger portions of our R&D investments to take advantage of long-term growth opportunities across our EESC segment,” said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD, during the company’s quarterly conference call with investors and financial analysts. “As we prioritize our R&D investments and simplify our business, we made the decision in the first quarter to exit the dense server systems business as we increase investments in our server processor development.”

seamicro_technology

One interesting this to note is that not only AMD is increasing its spending on development of server-class microprocessors, but it is also focusing on high-performance x86 and ARM central processing units (i.e., Zen and K12).

“We see very strong opportunities for next-generation, high-performance x86 and ARM processors for the enterprise, datacenter, and infrastructure markets and we will continue to invest strongly in these areas,” added Mr. Kumar.

While it is great to see that AMD is increasing investments in high-performance microprocessors, it should be pointed out that AMD simply has to boost spending on design of future both CPUs and GPUs. Design of chips to be made using FinFET process technologies costs around three times more than design of ICs made using a thin planar process technologies (e.g., 32nm, 28nm, etc.). When a company has to spend $80 – $100 million on one chip design instead of $30 – $40 million before, this firm has to increase its budgets. In AMD’s case this means abandoning businesses that make little sense and dropping projects that are not vital.

As a result of the decision of to shutter SeaMicro, AMD recorded $75 million of special charges in Q1 2015, primarily related to impairment of previously acquired intangible assets, of which $7 million will be paid in cash.

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KitGuru Says: Keeping in mind that AMD has not released any new SeaMicro product since 2012, shutting down the server maker is hardly a negative event for the industry. The big question is how this reflects the prospects of micro-servers in general. It seems that such machines with low-power microprocessors are not exactly getting popular. Moreover, a bunch of chip designers ceased to develop ARM-based server-class system-on-chips for micro-servers in the recent quarters. As it turns out, micro-server market is shrinking even before micro-servers became mainstream and any kind of competition started…

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AMD details ARM-based Opteron, plans sampling this quarter https://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/anton-shilov/amd-details-arm-based-opteron-plans-sampling-this-quarter/ https://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/anton-shilov/amd-details-arm-based-opteron-plans-sampling-this-quarter/#comments Wed, 29 Jan 2014 10:31:51 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=174957 Advanced Micro Devices has released additional details regarding the first server-class AMD Opteron A1100 microprocessor code-named “Seattle” based on ARMv8 micro-architecture. In addition, the company said that it would begin to send the chips to software developers to help programmers to tune their apps to 64-bit ARM technology already this quarter. AMD Opteron A1100 is …

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Advanced Micro Devices has released additional details regarding the first server-class AMD Opteron A1100 microprocessor code-named “Seattle” based on ARMv8 micro-architecture. In addition, the company said that it would begin to send the chips to software developers to help programmers to tune their apps to 64-bit ARM technology already this quarter.

AMD Opteron A1100 is a highly-integrated system-on-chip with up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit general-purpose cores with up to 4MB shared L2 cache and 8MB shared L3 cache; the chip also carries extensive offload engines for better power efficiency and reduced CPU loading, including server caliber encryption, and compression. The microprocessor features server-class dual-channel memory controller that supports up to 128GB of DDR3 or DDR4 ECC memory as unbuffered DIMMs, registered DIMMs or SODIMMs. In addition, AMD Opteron A1100 processor has extensive integrated I/O, including eight PCI Express 3.0 lanes, two 10Gb/s Ethernet ports, Freedom fabric and eight Serial ATA-3.0 ports. The chips will be made using 28nm process technology.

AMD has also announced plans to sample pre-production Opteron A1100 microprocessors to software developers so that to ensure that various programs are optimized for ARM Holding’s 64-bit technology in general and AMD’s system-on-chips in particular. By using AMD's Opteron A-series development kit, developers can contribute to the fast growing software ecosystem that already includes operating systems, compilers, hypervisors and applications.

amd_opteron_roadmap_1

Numerous operating system vendors have promised will support the 64-bit ARM ecosystem, including Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE, while virtualization will be enabled through KVM and Xen.

The OS support is complemented with programming language support, with Oracle and the community-driven OpenJDK porting versions of Java onto the 64-bit ARM architecture. Other languages that will run on AMD Opteron A-Series processors include Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The widespread GNU C compiler and the important GNU C Library have already been ported to the 64-bit ARM architecture

The Sunnyvale, California-based AMD plans to start commercial shipments of Opteron A1100 system-on-chips in the second half of the year.

KitGuru Says: AMD seems to be the first company to roll-out a server-class ARMv8-based system-on-chip. It remains to be seen how successful will the Opteron A1100 be on the market in general. In case AMD is lucky, then later this year it will get a boost from its micro-server SeaMicro division which will use the processor inside its machines for scale-out workloads.

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AMD begins to move away from PC industry https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/harrison/amd-begins-to-move-away-from-pc-industry/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/harrison/amd-begins-to-move-away-from-pc-industry/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:30:21 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=112375 Alongside the news that over 1,000 jobs would be lost to redundancy, last night's Q3 earnings call gave AMD the opportunity to discuss the changes it sees happening in the market – and how it sees itself ten years down the line. One thing was loud and clear, it won't be the PC business as …

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Alongside the news that over 1,000 jobs would be lost to redundancy, last night's Q3 earnings call gave AMD the opportunity to discuss the changes it sees happening in the market – and how it sees itself ten years down the line. One thing was loud and clear, it won't be the PC business as we've known it. AMD is saying that over 20% of its revenues for 2013 will come from embedded (up from 5%) and that micro servers could contribute even more in 2014.

Windows 8 will launch in October 2012. At that point in time, AMD says that it will have move than 125 design wins. A design win means that a significant manufacturer has chosen to use an AMD processor in a product – and then to build a number of them. Design wins are the totem poll used by industry insiders to predict likely sales. Because these products will be actively sold on the shelves for 3 months or more, more design wins means more sales. In the home, we have next-gen gaming consoles and, globally, data will start to be moved around by micro servers.

But what products have been chosen?

When KitGuru revealed AMD's future roadmap plans back in February, there were many question marks. These are now firming up into real products with real sales to real customers. That means

AMD's announcement that Trinity sales are looking to ramp up 75% quarter on quarter, means that a lot of the positive news for AMD comes from its integrated APU products. Initially, that will be into traditional PCs and laptops – but the possibilities are endless.

Rory Read is predicting a big ramp up in tablet sales with the announcement of AMD's new Z60 product (1GHz APU with 80 Radeon graphics processing cores – all of which fits into a power envelope of just 4.5w at full speed and 0.75w when your tablet is idling). Judging from the serious lack of  technical articles on the Z60 on the web – this hugely significant product seems to have had one of the quietest launches in AMD history. Which is strange, given its potential significance.

One of the biggest changes required for the future, moving toward a non-PC world, is the acceptance of lower operating margins for traditional products. Recent statements from Intel seem to indicate that the Core-production giant is confident that pricing will remain hard and that margins will stay high.

This assumption was directly challenged by Rory Read last night. He said that he was confident that price pressure would tell in the processor market and that ‘downward' was the only trend he could predict either for the average selling price on CPUs or the margins associated with them.

Read highlighted the fact that major customers had been very cautious about committing numbers to the p-coming launch of Windows 8 and that, as a result, sales would continue to be soft in the market.

Devinder Kumar went as far as saying that inventory control will be crucial going forward – and that getting stuck with product on the shelves during price reductions was something that he badly wants to avoid. With the overall quietness in the economy and the hard movement of customers away from traditional PCs toward tablets and other usage models means that AMD has no confidence that the traditional CPU market will ever come back.

Over the next 3 years, the single biggest revenue increase will come from the Cloud, AMD told us. Dr Lisa Su told listeners that she has teams putting special focus on micro servers and embedded technologies – and that these would be a significant part of the future for AMD.

From what we know, all of the next generation game consoles will move to AMD and its APU technology, which will begin to have impact toward the end of 2013. A separate SeaMicro team will be aiming to chip away [Pun intended – Ed] at Intel's traditional business. Significant revenues from SeaMicro are expected after the complete infrastructure is in place by 2014. Lisa Su said that having the hardware was not enough and that AMD needed a full set of software solutions to also be available – alongside a channel to sell all of that micro server goodness through.

Out of its traditional businesses – the only one where AMD is close to its own sales prediction is 3D graphics cards.

Tablets, clouds and embedded - these 3 areas mark the future for AMD according to CEO Rory Read.

KitGuru says: The movement to cloud, tablets and embedded shows a very different future for AMD. It looks like Intel will have free reign in the shrinking PC market, but can projects like Ultrabook ensure continued growth for the world's number one CPU company?

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

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SeaMicro’s new low power server has 512 Atom cores https://www.kitguru.net/professional/server/carl/seamicro-low-power-server-has-512-atom-cores-850ghz-of-processing-power/ https://www.kitguru.net/professional/server/carl/seamicro-low-power-server-has-512-atom-cores-850ghz-of-processing-power/#respond Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:50:22 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=35517 SeaMicro today announced a new low power server which contains 256 of Intel's Atom N570 dual core processors. The new SM10000-64 has 512 Atom processing cores which operate at 1.66ghz, which when combined deliver 850GHZ of processing power. Intel's low power Atom processors are generally used in netbooks and low powered media centers but these …

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SeaMicro today announced a new low power server which contains 256 of Intel's Atom N570 dual core processors. The new SM10000-64 has 512 Atom processing cores which operate at 1.66ghz, which when combined deliver 850GHZ of processing power.

Intel's low power Atom processors are generally used in netbooks and low powered media centers but these processors are considered to be very power efficient when compared to traditional server processors for specific tasks, such as Web transactions, which can often contain small amounts of data which can be processed quickly.

This new server design idea is targeted to data centers which deal with a large volume of internet transactions, such as social networking, email and search, according to SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman. A group of Atom cores in specific situations could provide better performance per watt than Intel's Xeon and AMD's Opteron processors which consume more power and are created for more intensive database or math applications.

SeaMicro SM10000 Server

Feldman said “It's moving from big hardware and software to lots of little hardware and software, we are building systems that are designed to optimize compute-per-watt.”

This shift to low power chips is becoming more prominent as many companies look to cut their energy bills. Dell already offer low power x86 servers for specific demands and Microsoft have apparently asked Intel to develop a 16 core Atom chip for servers. AMD are also evaluating their Fusion chip designs for server environments. British processor company ARM are also aiming to target the server sector with future designs with Marvell already announcing a server chip based on ARM architecture. Nvidia have also joined the surge with their Project Denver code name which is an ARM based CPU designed for PC's and servers.

SeaMicro's move to the faster dual core N570 has reduced the number of chips in the server which has also reduced power consumption. The server when compared to their last release demands 15 to 17 percent less power and it now also supports 64 bit operating systems which improves the addressable memory support.

Feldman said “The N570 is the highest performance, low power processor bar none.” The pricing will start at $148,000 and is now available in the US which international options available. It can hold up to 1TB of DDR3 memory and up to 64 hard drives. It is a 10 rack tall unit.

KitGuru says: The start of high performance multi core ATOM server systems.

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