AMD's ready to scale you up

When it comes to scaling x86 servers, it's smarter to think inside the box
by Tom Yager on March 26, 2008

Scale up is the factor that has kept proprietary Unix big iron in business. Linux on a commodity two-socket Intel server was supposed to push HP, IBM, and Sun out of business. It looks that way if you see a rack chassis as a rack chassis without regard for what's inside. But scale-up maximizes everything from power savings and server consolidation ratio to server longevity, with the bonus of lower long-term costs and higher availability. All AMD Opteron servers scale up. It's baked into the CPU, the bus, and the total system architecture. AMD's strategy is to make it possible to scale up any Opteron server for five years with only a CPU swap, no new server required. This stands in stark contrast to Intel's "tick tock" plan that attempts to nail IT to the stereotypical two-year purchasing cycle. Intel's two-year cycle of obsoleting chips makes parts scarce and expensive, so that if you do buy an Intel-based server with empty sockets with plans to scale it up, it's unlikely that CPUs precisely matching the models you have now will be available, and the availability of FB-DIMM memory at your existing Intel servers' speed may be rare as well. AMD's five-year plan is more in line with the way IBM treats, and retains, its customers.

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