Processors power enterprise opportunity

By John Fruehe, AMD

Business leaders may not immediately appreciate the ability of the latest processing and server advances to grow the bottom line. They may vaguely understand how innovation around central processing unit (CPU) technology has something to do with data centre performance and efficiency, but that’s often where their level of knowledge ends and they defer to the specialist expertise of the data centre manager or IT director. But those business and IT directors that actively work together to explore the advantages offered by the latest CPU developments can position their company to capture potentially significant business advantages. Put simply, the latest CPU development advances are allowing companies to do more with less, and are no longer necessarily the sole preserve of large, global enterprises with deep pockets and massive, global computing requirements.

Achieving more with less

The latest processor architecture innovations enable businesses to deploy servers and PC workstations that can have more processing cores and memory, but can cost less money. As the US and Europe start to come out of the recent economic troubles, companies doing business in those regions will want to be smart about how they spend their capital. The latest processor advances have been designed to help businesses replace aging systems with newer, more powerful ones that can allow for a condensed data centre footprint and savings on costs like maintenance, power, and general IT management.

To meet this demand, processor manufacturers are beginning to develop architectures that deliver a more balanced take on the traditional price-performance processor equation. Specifically, chip manufacturers are making the same features and functionality available across the price-performance range. For example, a few years ago the server market would have put a premium on processors capable of being run in servers with four processor sockets. Today, increased competition and availability have brought these premiums down, which means that advanced technology can be had for a lower price than what was previously the norm.

Driving efficiency

Moreover, consistency in features and functionality across the price-performance range can reduce the workload for companies by minimising the need to take repetitive actions. Imagine an enterprise that used processor chips that mirrored each other in features and functionality – the enterprise could have the ability to write software once and migrate it anywhere, which could greatly cut down IT costs. Also, nowadays, businesses want to run more and more complex applications and databases. I remember when I used to be able to carry around a whole presentation on a floppy disc. But there’s been an explosion of data – rich, multimedia, browser-based data – that isn’t going to stop growing. This means a requirement for larger memory and more cores for data crunching and virtualisation.

This is why AMD is leading the way with the launch of the world’s first eight and 12-core x86 processors in the AMD Opteron 6100 Series (codenamed “Magny Cours ”). At the end of the day, businesses want to minimise the time their IT people spend touching the hardware. It’s not just about power and performance, it’s about making all your people more efficient.

About the author

John Fruehe is the Worldwide Business Development Manager for Server/Workstation products at AMD. Focusing specifically on distribution channel, reseller and system builders, his team helps to evangelise the benefits of AMD Opteron processors to AMD's key channel partners.  As a 15-year veteran of the enterprise market, he has held global marketing and sales management positions at key technology leaders including Dell Inc., Compaq Computer, Zenith Data Systems and CDW.