Summary : Rich Fichera looks at the risks and potential rewards of AMD's recent acquisition of innovative server startup SeaMicro .
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summary rich fichera look risk potential reward amd's recent acquisition innovative server startup seamicro
Summary : Rich Fichera looks at the risks and potential rewards of <m> AMD's </m> recent acquisition of innovative server startup SeaMicro .
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AMD Acquires SeaMicro – Big Bet on Architectural Shift for Servers
Summary : Rich Fichera looks at the risks and potential rewards of <m> AMD's </m> recent acquisition of innovative server startup SeaMicro .
March 1 , 2012 - - 07 : 58 GMT ( 23 : 58 PST )
At its recent financial analyst day , AMD indicated that intended to differentiate itself by creating products that were advantaged in niche markets , with specific mention , among other segments , of servers , and to generally shake up the trench warfare that has had it on the losing side of its lifelong battle with Intel ( my interpretation , not AMD management ’ s words ) .
Today , at least for the server side of the business they made a move that can potentially offer them visibility and differentiation by acquiring innovative server startup SeaMicro .
SeaMicro has attracted our attention since its appearance ( blog post 1 , blog post 2 ) , with its innovative architecture that dramatically reduces power and improves density by sharing components like I / O adapters , disks and even BIOS over a proprietary fabric .
The irony here is that SeaMicro came to market with a tight alignment with Intel , who at one pint even introduced a special dual - core packaging of their Atom CPU to allow SeaMicro improve its density and power efficiency .
Most recently SeaMicro and Intel announced a new model which featured Xeon CPUs to address the more mainstream segments that were not a for SeaMicro ’ s original Atom - based offering .
So what does AMD hope to gain from this acquisition ?
The strategic goal is a differentiated server architecture into which they can insert AMD silicon and IP .
The SeaMicro architecture shares many of the characteristics of the Calxeda / HP Redstone architecture , and can potentially allow AMD to produce reference architecture for its system partners to leverage that gives them significant density advantages over any conventional x86 server offering .
Since this architecture is initially targeted at dense computing environments such as those found in Web 2 . 0 , cloud service providers and similar workloads , as well as potentially at conventional HPC , the prospects for AMD are interesting .
Long - term success will hinge on several interlocking factors :
1 . How much will AMD focus this offering on the ultra - dense space that SeaMicro started addressing versus trying to also take a bite out of the enterprise space ?
2 . How aggressively will they scale it ?
The SeaMicro fabric does not extend beyond the single enclosure boundary , but that appears to be an implementation decision , not a fundamental architectural issue .
My personal belief is that fabric - based servers are the wave of the future , with SeaMicro Calxeda / HP serving as very significant guidelines for future development .
Scaling the fabric first for management and then for actual data traffic for shared I / O and eventually for coherent memory operations if needed is a natural progression .
3 . What other IP will AMD add ?
AMD has an interesting portfolio of GPU technology as well as CPU , and the incorporation of GPU technology could provide further differentiation in niche markets .
AMD has a choice of ways to monetize this IP , from selling systems based on its own processors ( possibly as early as late this year ) to providing reference designs and / or licensing the architecture or selling components like the fabric ASICs .
4 . Will they also support ARM processors ?
If AMD becomes the source of licensed IP for vendors wanting to chase HP in ultra - dense servers , they can also make money by licensing their technology and selling components for non - x86 architectures .
5 . What will Intel do ?
At least one of Intel ’ s partners , HP , already has a fabric - based dense server design that can support x86 .
Will Intel develop a similar reference architecture in the hopes that their major systems partners will adopt it ?
All in all , many ways this could play out , but a bold move and one that may serve to trigger a rapid change in the types of servers available to users over the next 24 months .