Fusion, The Next Big Thing To Hit The Processor Market

In a one-on-one with Biztech2.0, Vamsi Krishna, senior technical manager, AMD India, talks about energy efficient processors and trends in this space.
Can you shed light on the AMD-Red Hat virtual machine and how does that translate into customer migration?

On a Red Hat and AMD partnership, we can live migrate virtual machines from different generations of AMD platforms and even competitive platforms such as an Intel box to an AMD box. In a heterogeneous environment, where there are several boxes of various generations and when a CIO or IT manager knows that he/she can move the virtual machines from one box to another box, he/she need not worry about the deployments and can rest assured that the platforms are going to work heterogeneously. There is no problem of compatibility between platforms and there is increased flexibility in data centre operations.

What are AMD’s energy efficiency offerings?

AMD believes in coming out with innovative features. For instance, with Shanghai smart fetch, the core can be completely turned off if there is no application requirement in that particular core, which would result in saving a lot of energy and power per processor. If this is done across the data centre, it aggregates into significant power and energy saving. Another advantage is that the cooling costs are also indirectly proportional to the power consumption of the processor. The thumb rule is that 60 percent of power consumed by the processor is used for cooling the processor also. This also melts down to saving the indirect costs as well. That’s the advantage of having energy efficient features.

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How does AMD’s new line-up aid virtualisation?

We started aligning our processor designs so that we could add new features that could give virtualised environments better performance. Most of the virtual operating systems do a lot of memory management by themselves. So when software does the management it takes longer to process.
What we did with our AMD Opteron processors is that we offloaded the entire memory and IO management done in the past, which results in multiplying the virtual performance from generation to generation. Right from the dual core to the quad core, we added several features taking off the complete load from the virtual operating system.

How do AMD processors manage energy efficiency?

Apart from smart fetch, there are other features such as the cool core technology that manage energy efficiency. Cool core depends on applications. The processor is sub-divided into a number of blocks and not all applications use these blocks. For instance, the exchange server doesn’t need a floating-point block, so the CPU automatically understands that the application doesn’t need this block and switches off the block.

What is the advantage of having a common core design across server markets?

In a heterogeneous environment, the data centre is based on the demand made by applications. Some applications demand a two-socket architecture, some four and some eight. Mission-critical applications like databases call for an eight-socket architecture. We have a standard policy that we use a common core between 2P to 8P. That way, a lot of application developers have the advantage of developing for one core and utilising it across the spectrum. A common core is faster to market from an AMD, partner and customer deployment perspective.

What is AMD’s green IT strategy?

As a corporate organisation, we are very gung-ho about green IT and it is a policy that we religiously follow. Most of our data centres are virtualised. We have consolidated our servers and thus, have cut down on unnecessary residual energy costs.

What trends do you see in the processor space?

One trend that we foresee is ‘fusion’. Fusion has different dimensions to it. Every application will not benefit from a common fusion. For instance, if it is a high performing workstation kind of application fusing the GPU and CPU, it will result in better performance, so that will be a common trend for that particular direction. The CPU will have multi-dimensional trends but on a broad scale it will be called the AMD fusion technology, fusing different technologies so that a particular domain gets the advantage.