X-bit labs

AMD’s Torrenza Initiative Begins to Materialize.

Category: CPU

by Anton Shilov

[ 09/24/2007 | 08:41 AM ]

A little more than a year after the introduction AMD Torrenza co-processor initiative materialized in real products that are set to be commercially available shortly from now, Advanced Micro Devices announced last week. The claim should demonstrate that the plan to enable third-parties to innovate AMD’s server platform is beginning to pay off.

Currently Hewlett Packard, Activ Financial Systems and RapidMind are either offer or readying co-processor solutions under the Torrenza initiative. Besides, AMD itself also offers its so-called AMD Stream Processor product, which is based on ATI Radeon X1900 graphics processing unit, but is meant for high-performance computing, but not gaming. Unfortunately for AMD, the adoption of both Stream Processor and Torrenza seems to be slow.

Activ Financial Systems has been selling its ActivFeed MPU (market data processing unit), a hardware accelerated solution for low-latency exchange feed processing, for many months and says its customers are positive about the FPGA-based (field programmable graphics array) hardware co-processor for AMD64 second-generation servers.

Select next-generation HP ProLiant Servers with the quad-core AMD Opteron processor will support HTX cards, enabling end users to deploy customized acceleration solutions within their current or future data center infrastructure, HP recently announced.

RapidMind is developing programming tools that lets software organizations leverage multi-core processors with minimal impact on their development costs and timelines. The resulting applications can “harness the full potential of the latest multi-core processors from AMD, seamlessly taking advantage of acceleration technology available with Torrenza solutions,” the company said, adding that custom-made co-processors may speed up computing of certain data by 30 times.

“As computing demands exponentially grow, the keys to success are new models of increased computational performance that simultaneously alleviate cross-industry pain points like power consumption and infrastructure complexity. AMD is dedicated to enabling these cutting-edge performance models by arming Torrenza partners with a superior processor architecture and stable platform that is the basis for accelerated computing advancement,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, server and workstation division, AMD.