Sustainable Technology

AMD offers six-core processors that push the envelope on energy efficiency benchmarks. The company will offer CPUs later this year, that exclusively optimize power consumption. …

… “The new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor offers up to 18 percent lower platform-level power consumption over the standard wattage version. (AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2425 [SPECpower_ssj 2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 419,277 ssj_ops, & 221W @ 100% target load] compared to AMD Opteron processor Model 2435 [SPECpower_ssj 2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 487,764 ssj_ops & 270W @ 100% target load]). It also delivers up to 18 percent better performance-per-watt compared to the quad-core version. ” …

Via Advanced Micro Devices: Six-Cores in a Consistent Power Envelope

The future for data centers is increased processor power, higher-density, greater heat-generation, and growing cooling requirements. Cooling techniques are being researched to deal with this developing trend. …

… “As the demand for data centers continues to rise, despite the down economy, Moore’s Law-the prediction that processors will become twice as powerful every 18 months to 2 years-means that data centers will produce more heat. ” …

Via IT World / CIO: Cooler Data Centers

Netronome has launched its Network Flow Processor product family which enables a unified computing architecture. The products are designed to provide high performance and market-beating power efficiency, while leveraging general Intel processors. …

… “High-Performance: Powered by 40 multi-threaded programmable networking cores running at 1.4GHz, the NFP delivers over 56 billion instructions per second with 320 hardware threads that optimize memory utilization – allowing for 1800 instructions per packet at 30 million packets per second. This enables 20Gbps of L2-L7 deep packet processing with line-rate security and I/O virtualization for millions of simultaneous flows. Power Efficiency: Operating at only 15 to 35 watts, the NFP-32xx revolutionizes green computing by delivering more than four times the power efficiency of its closest competitor. ” …

Via Netronome: Network Flow Processors (PDF)

CPU extends its computing and power-conserving strength to new scale. …

… “Through the above innovations in processor architecture, the VIA Nano processor is able to offer the significant performance improvements that come with the new superscalar architecture, within the same low power envelope of the VIA C7 processor. ” …

Via VIA Technologies: Nano Processor

Intel shares insights on the progression of their CPU product roadmap. Each generation will look to maximize energy-efficiency as the line-widths shrink and transistor density increases. …

… “Westmere is basically a Nehalem shrink onto the 32nm process. It will have six cores, cache enhancements and better energy efficiency, and will be announced in 2010. ” …

Via Channel Register: Cores

AMD challenges Intel for ownership of the future data center by introducing powerful server CPU roadmap that is power efficient. …

… “Months ahead of schedule, AMD plans to deliver the six-core AMD Opteron processor code named Istanbul in June this year, with up to 30 percent more performance within the same power envelope and on the same platform as current Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. ” …

Via AMD: Server Platform Roadmap

AMD vid of Istanbul Six cores versus Quad core CPU …

Microsoft shares its research pipeline with employees at its internal TechFest. Data center efficiency is a hot topic with two research projects headlining. …

… “Two particular datacenter projects were on display: Closed-Loop Control Systems for the Datacenter, a project aimed at improving the energy efficiency of datacenters by selectively putting idle servers into a low-power state while maintaining service response times; Low-Power Processors for the Datacenter, an experiment to build a server from low-power processors and evaluate how well it runs some of the tasks typically performed in a datacenter, such as processing a large number of independent requests or running databases for a Web site; ” …

Via Microsoft: Research Innovations

Power savings are on the CPU roadmap from AMD. …

… “APU is AMD speak for a CPU and a graphics processor on one piece of silicon. AMD expects Sabine to bring significant power savings to notebook computers. ” …

Via DailyTech: Future Processors

AMD discusses its path to profitability which is linked to its ability to innovate with efficient and powerful processors. …

… “AMD also launched its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Previously codenamed Shanghai, these processors deliver up to 35% more performance than the previous generation Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor and up to a 35% decrease in power consumption at idle, along with sweeping virtualization performance leadership. ” …

Via Advanced Micro Devices: Focused Innovation