AMD slows new Opteron 6300 chips to match workloads

January 22, 2014

Vendors don’t normally brag about slower products but Advanced Micro Devices is making an exception for its latest Opteron 6300 processors, which have a slower clock speed than their predecessors to reduce power consumption. Some AMD customers use its chips in highly virtualized systems, and those types of servers tend to max out their memory and I/O bandwidth before they can make use of all the CPU performance, said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, general manager of AMDs server division. That means they’re using a higher-performance chip than they need, and burning more electricity. So AMD is introducing new versions that dial down the clock-speed and reduce the power draw by 15 to 30 percent. “They’re looking at the actual core utilization and seeing that only 60 to 70 percent of the core is being used because of memory and I/O limits, based on their workloads,” Gopalakrishnan said. “That’s prompted them to come to us and say, ‘We’re not really using all this performance so can you lower the power, so that the overall data center power consumption is lower.’” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2090240/amd-slows-new-opteron-6300-chips-to-match-workloads.html#tk.rss_all