Sweet spot
As the end of 2009 draws near, AMD has been musing over its server strategy, with director of product marketing for the firm's server division John Fruehe sharing his thoughts about AMD's strategy to corner the volume market, and target the "sweet spot."
"In my 17 years in the server business, I've never been more excited about an upcoming year as I am for 2010 because of how we are targeting that volume market," writes Fruehe in a blog post.
He goes on to say that because the top half of the volume market is driven by scalability and performance, as well as by virtualisation, database, business and compute intensive applications, the more cores and memory channels the better, as "price/performance-per-watt is now king."
Fruehe says that with the firm's Opteron 6000 Series platform AMD is planning to introduce "aggressive and scalable 2P systems to tackle the top of the volume market, along with a new category of 4P servers."
The goal, apparently, is for 4P servers to be put into optimal configurations to begin challenging the top end of the 2P space, instead of the other way around. "You won't be talking in terms of sockets anymore - but rather in terms of core and memory capabilities," Fruehe noted.
AMD is rather hoping that its two socket AMD Opteron 6100 series platforms - with its up to 12 cores and four memory channels per processor - will become not just important, but an "extremely strong competitor" for most of the 2P market workloads.
