Opteron leads 64-bit revolution

Computerworld - It's hard to overestimate the importance of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron x86, 64-bit processor. In just over a year, the three major enterprise hardware vendors have built offerings around it, and AMD's biggest competitor, Intel Corp., is producing its own version of the chip. Opteron is forcing change.

What this means for users is this: The 32-bit-only processor is about to go the way of the 16-bit chip. "By year-end, we will be selling very, very few 32-bit systems," said Paul Miller, vice president for industry-standard servers at Hewlett-Packard Co.

As users refresh or add industry-standard servers, they'll seed their data centers with 64-bit-capable x86 processors. The pricing differences between current 32-bit boxes and those running on 64-bit chips will be negligible in the near future, so the reason for buying 32-bit chips will gradually disappear, say vendors and analysts. Think of 64-bit capability as a free upgrade, ready for use when the applications arrive.

Opteron has gained a lot of attention because it allows users to run 32-bit and 64-bit x86 applications on the same chip, giving users the flexibility to gradually move to the 64-bit world. But the chip also includes architectural changes that may speed a 32-bit application's performance.

For now, early Opteron adopters like Aristotle Balogh, senior vice president of operations and infrastructure at VeriSign Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., tend to have memory-hungry custom-built applications. VeriSign already uses many RISC- and Intel-based servers to support, among other things, directory services for the .com registry. It has been testing two- and four-processor Opteron systems, putting tremendous processing loads on them in a "beat the box up until it drops" test, and the chip has performed well, Balogh says.

Balogh can get 64-bit capacity from RISC-based Unix systems. But a four-processor Opteron box with 32GB of memory will cost about $25,000, whereas a Unix box may cost more than $100,000. "With traditional Unix vendors, it is a very expensive proposition," says Balogh.

The memory gain allowed by a 64-bit chip is a big advantage, but it's not the only one. Opteron, which can run 32- and 64-bit applications, is gathering support from some 32-bit users because of how it's designed.

AMD has developed what it calls HyperTransport technology, which directly connects the CPU to the memory, eliminating the need for a bus. This reduces latency and speeds processing time, which is why Automated Trading Desk LLC, a company that provides trading technology and financial trading services, started using Opteron on Altus servers from San Francisco-based Penguin Computing Inc.