SAN FRANCISCO – Advanced Micro Devices took the first small step toward making its Freedom Fabric an interconnect of choice for linking server processors. AMD’s SeaMicro group announced Intel- and AMD-based systems extending the link to up to 1,048 hard drives or five petabytes of external storage.
SeaMicro expects to continue selling both Intel and AMD systems for the foreseeable future. The group is courting big server makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard as partners for Freedom Fabric, but so far has no announced supporters.
The news comes the same day Intel announced it is designing a new interconnect it will pack into future Xeon and Atom server chips for linking server processors. The lack of a timeline from either AMD or Intel for packing their new technologies into server CPUs shows the interconnect battle will extend over the next several years
Freedom Fabric is essentially a follow on the HyperTransport interconnect used in the first AMD Opteron processors. “AMD has to show success with Freedom Fabric to attract other people to adopt it,” said Patrick Moorhead, principle of Moor Insights & Strategy (Austin).
AMD may have a slight lead because the SeaMicro systems will be available in November at prices starting at about $140,000, said Nathan Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.). By contrast, it’s not clear when Intel will release products using its clustering interconnect.
One of the SM15000 servers uses an Opteron CPU supporting 64 GBytes DRAM.