AMD announces $99 cloud chip

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday announced a new family of microprocessors for cloud computing servers, including one chip priced at US$99.

The chips belong to the Opteron 4100 family and come in six-core and four-core variants. Previously code-named Lisbon, they draw less power than their predecessors while achieving the same levels of performance, said Brent Kerby, senior product manager at AMD.

The processors include the $99 Opteron 4122 processor, which is AMD’s first server chip priced under $100. The quad-core chip operates at a speed of 2.2GHz, includes a total of 8.6MB of cache and draws 75 watts of power. By comparison, Intel’s cheapest server processor is priced at $167, according to a processor price list issued on June 20.

There’s a movement toward having huge arrays of cloud computing servers with cheap chips that can quickly scale performance, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group.

“The question now is, can you take a huge number of inexpensive, low-power chips and get useful work out of them?” Olds said.

Companies like SeaMicro and Tilera this month introduced specialized 512-core servers designed for cloud computing. SeaMicro announced a server that packs 512 single-core Intel Atom processors in one server.

The $99 quad-core Opteron will draw more power than any low-power Atom chip, but also perform much faster, Olds said. The question remains whether traditional servers with cheap Opteron chips are a better option for scale-out environments than specialized servers.

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