Oh Yeah - Going to the AMD server symposium
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
On october 20th, your very own primesuspect will be attending the AMD Solution Provider Server
Symposium. I'll be sure to snag some swag.. Perhaps some of it may make it's way into prize packages for the LAN party
Symposium. I'll be sure to snag some swag.. Perhaps some of it may make it's way into prize packages for the LAN party
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It was pretty much what I expected: A lot of benchmarks and powerpoint slides about how rock-ass the Opterons are. This was a targeted event for Server providers.. It was a very small crowd (21 people) so it was quite intimate. The hooey presentation was what you would expect, but the Q&A session was quite fun.
Also, got to see a 4p Opteron system with 16 GIGS OF RAM. holy crapola
They were showing specs and actual hardware for their Verified Server Program vendor, which is Celestica. Celestica has 1U, 2P Opteron servers with 500 WATT PSUs (way overkill for a 1U server - even the AMD and Celestica reps admitted to this) that have 8 DDR slots for a potential 16gb of ram. Not bad.
The Q&A session was pretty cool, except I was in a room with 3 interesting people and 17 duds. Myself and 3 others asked about 20 questions amongst us. The microphone guys ended up hanging out next to me and next to the table with the 3 others.
We did get an AMD engineer to talk about .09 and .065 micron processors
They slammed Hyperthreading as being "fake dual processing" .. The engineer put it best. "Umm, let me ask you this - how can you have dual processing with only one processor?" and proceeded to explain that in the process of deciding with thread to use (provided the software even knows to look for HT) it actually takes up more time than the benefit that is gained from being able to work on two threads at once. He said "Yeah, hyperthreading - we've had that for years... Microsoft put it in Windows 95 and called it multitasking"
We also get word that Microsoft "loves" AMD-64 extensions. Another engineer piped in (the kind who has no public speaking skills, but has a deep passion for his job) and, like a kid in a candy store, proceeded to tell us about the Win64 development center which he has spent time in and the racks and racks of opterons that microsoft is "playing with". Whee. They did not admit to it, of course, but after speaking with the engineers, I feel somewhat confident that Intel will have no choice but to provide support for AMD64 extensions in their forthcoming processors.
They said we will definitely be seeing a PCI-Express enabled HyperTransport link. Also, Opterons with DDR400 support are just around the corner, although both engineers and marketing dude said that the performance benefit is really quite small, switching from 333 to 400. One engineer said that 400 is more optimized because the HT links are divided into 200mhz lanes, so there is no skew as there is with 166mhz over 200mhz lanes.
They gave away Opteron 244s as door prizes, but poor me didn't get one. I swear the 2 guys who won them looked clueless and certainly had no idea what they were going to do with them... .
I walked out with 2 t-shirts, a baseball cap, a pen that broke on my way to my car, and a really cool USB optical travel mouse with the opteron logo screened on the inside of it - it's made of clear acrylic and is very snazzy. It also has a retractable cord.
All told, the event was pretty cool. I was already an opteron convert before I went, but this just justified it. Why anyone would put dual Xeons in a server at this point is beyond me. AMD has a clear, razor sharp, katana-wielding-ninja of a win with this processor. It makes Xeons look pretty silly.
oh, and the food ROCKED ASS. Very well done.
It goes with my AMD Yo-Yo, mint packs, 4 shirts, Area-64 winner paper, AMD badges, AMD Tour pass, AMD hat, AMD poster, AMD stickers, AMD processors and AMD bag!