January 25, 2009 by James Oliver
Chip maker, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) plans to add a new processor to its line this year. Nothing particularly newsworthy there, I know, except that the new chip will be ultra low-power. The reason that’s useful is that it minimises problems with heating and cooling, so that the chip can be installed in large servers that get a lot of use. However, so far, the company is declining to say just how much power usage they have managed to cut with their new Opteron processor.
The development this particular chip was no doubt inspired by the announcement that Microsoft would be using Opteron processors for their Windows Azure service – a large cloud computing initiative.
AMD apparently believes in cloud computing, and is betting on the idea that low power chips will become more and more popular in the near future due to the rise of the massive data centres, being built by Google, Microsoft, et al., which will facilitate it.
That is not their opinion alone. Last year Intel released its 50-watt Xeon chip, with a similar view to minimising heating and cooling issues in large installations. It would appear that a new battlefront has opened up it the chip making war.
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