AMD India, which recently announced the availability of its six-core server processor AMD Optron processor (code-named Istanbul) in India for two-, four- and eight-socket servers, has the same security features as AMD’s Shanghai series.
According to Ramkumar Subramanian, vice president, sales and marketing, AMD India, “As compared to ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Shanghai’ series, the Istanbul’s CPU security features are similar, but the platform security features are being expanded. Later this year, our partners will ship platforms that include our high performance IOMMU that will enhance the security of our platforms.
“This includes AMD’s enhanced virus protection technology, AMD’s virtualization technology to provide strong and secure isolation between virtual machines, AMD’s I/O protection technology to protect applications from rogue devices, and our late launch secure initialization technology to bootstrap a trusted hypervisor,” Ramkumar added.
Optron extends AMD’s commitment to offering server customers superior value at every price point with unmatched platform flexibility.
Ramkumat further stated that Istanbul incorporates all the security technologies for current and future OSes that are being developed by OSV partners.
“Future products will include accelerators for encryption to improve the throughput and reduce the power consumption of services such as: disk encryption, virtual private networks (VPNs), and secure web transactions, he added.
Across a single platform, AMD can address the need for more cores and greater scalability with the new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor and offer a cost- and power-efficient solution with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Systems based on Six-Core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available beginning this month from leading OEMs including Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, along with support from motherboard and infrastructure partners. HE, SE and EE versions of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor are planned for the second half of 2009.
AMD said that Istanbul will change the economics of the server market as it believes that the new processors meets the increasing need for a combination of low TCO, better performance-per-watt and scalability.
The new six-core processor claims to have up to 34 per cent more performance-per-watt over the previous generation quad-core processors in the exact same platform. A perceived advantage of the processor is that it supports Socket F (1207), which the earlier generation Shanghai processors also supported.