The Hindu : Front Page : ‘Buy one, get three free’ era of super computing is here

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 17, 2007
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‘Buy one, get three free’ era of super computing is here

Anand Parthasarathy

AMD’s ‘quad core’ Opteron chip banks on power efficiency over raw speed

AMD created the first dual core chip
Gigahertz do not matter any more

— Photo: K. Gopinathan

Alok Ohrie, Managing Director AMD India (left), Michael O’Brien, Director, World Wide Commercial Systems, AMD Austin hold the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor introduced in Bangalore recently.

Bangalore: When you buy packets of potato chips in supermarkets, the ‘special offer’ so often says, “Buy three, get one free.” The computer chip business these days, offers a better deal which seems to say: “Buy one, get three free.”

The launch by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last week of its ‘Quad Core’ Opteron processor — aimed at the high-end ‘server’ computers that fuel data centres and large corporate network — means both the PC chip-makers, Intel and AMD, now offer one chip that does the work of four.

Just one day after the global launch of the 4-in-1 Opteron, HCL Infosystems unveiled a range of made-in-India servers — the Infinit Xcel Line 2200 LY and 2200 YA — fuelled by the chip and targeting web servers, defence applications and computer-aided design.

Intel’s Quad Core Xeon processors were out some months ago — but as experts point out the design was achieved by strapping two dual-core chips together on the same slab of silicon, whereas, the new AMD Opteron is the first ‘native’ quad chip, which means, it was designed bottom-up, as four separate processor cores per chip.

An enlarged photo of the ‘silicon die’ shows this clearly.

It was so earlier too, in the ding-dong battle of the chip-makers. AMD created the first dual core chip; Intel caught up — by putting two single cores on a chip — to start with.

Do these fabrication details matter? May be not. But it is significant that both of these chip-makers no longer mention speed of their processors work as the USP. Gigahertz don’t matter, any more — apparently. Now they tell us, ‘performance per watt’ of power consumed, is what matters... banking on efficiency over raw speed.

AMD claims it has doubled the cores on the chip from two to four, with hardly any increase of power consumed.

How does it do it? It says its “CoolCore” technology, turns off power to parts of the processor that are not working at the moment — like a thrifty house-owner going around switching off lights in rooms where there is nobody present.

With multiple cores, working simultaneously on the same chip — four will become eight in a couple of years from now — the time to accomplish computational tasks can drop dramatically. Which is why the new quad core era brings, even nearer, the day when every desktop computer will be a super computer — including the ones that you and I will use.

Compelling new applications in multimedia, graphics, music, and games will make it not just desirable, but essential for one to own a super computer.

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