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At the recent ATCA Summit AMD showcased its latest advancements for helping improve the network performance capability of industry-standard Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture blade servers.


Quad-Core AMD (News - Alert) Opteron processors, at 50 and 71W TDP, provide a high-performance, low-power platform for the networking and telecommunications market. The new AMD server chipset, which features PCI (News - Alert) Express 2.0 and HyperTransport 3 technology, provides a complete solution with improved I/O capabilities to increase performance compared to previous generation platforms.

“The increased bandwidth offered by PCI Express 2.0 is useful in improving network data throughput when combined with an appropriate increase in the number of CPUs or CPU cores to help accurately route the additional traffic,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Business, AMD.

“The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers this compute power and with 50W and 71W versions available, is a great option for the 200W power budget of the ATCA specification,” said Patla.

The Six-Core AMD Opteron processor with AMD chipset, is reportedly the AMD’s first server platform combining the CPU and chipset that gives system designers Hyper Transport 3.0 technology, PCI Express 2.0 and new AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology features such as IO-virtualization and bridges Six-Core AMD Opteron processor with AMD chipset platform designs with AMD’s future platforms.

“Our research shows the market for ATCA applications remains quite strong, despite the downturn. This is in part due to the industry’s shift from proprietary designs to interoperable standards and commercial off the shelf building blocks,” said Erik Heikkila, director, embedded hardware and systems, VDC Research. “Improvements to AMD’s blade platform are a great example of this building block concept. Customers who have implemented a previous AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA system now have the option to further extend their design with an easy upgrade.”

Patrick Welzien, vice president, Engineering, Diversified Technology (News - Alert), Inc., said that with the new AMD embedded platform, the company is able to deliver superior performance on high-bandwidth networks and still maintain the strict overall system power limit of the ATCA specification.