AMD Technology Helps Bring “Predators” To Life on the Big Screen

Troublemaker Studios utilized Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors and ATI FirePro™ graphics accelerators to create animations and special effects for the new film “Predators”, now in theaters. Produced and executive directed by acclaimed film maker, Robert Rodriquez, Predators stars Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody in a tale about a group of elite warriors who come to realize they’ve been brought together on an alien planet…as prey.

With a long history in the movie making industry, Troublemaker Studios is using AMD technology to push the envelope of digital movie making and special effects in several blockbuster films.

In addition to “Predators”, Rodriguez has looked to AMD technology to create six of his movies, including “Shorts”, “Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams”, “Spy Kids 3D: Game Over”, “Planet Terror”, and “Sin City”.

Rodriguez’s next film, “Machete”, is currently in production employing AMD technology as the movie’s digital hardware backbone, and is expected to be released on September 3, 2010.

The creative team at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios use workstations based upon AMD’s superior ATI FirePro V8800 graphics solutions and Six-Core AMD Opteron processors which enable the digital artist to create and iterate at the speed of thought.”

“With the AMD platforms, my creative team has the freedom to quickly design and animate all the required concepts and designs,” said Robert Rodriguez, Troublemaker Studios. “AMD’s complete platform solution helps turn our visions into reality – we can easily and quickly manipulate images or scenes without the wait process previously associated with computer technology.”

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New Six-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Delivers Up to Thirty-Four Percent More Performance-per-Watt in Exact Same Platform

AMD today announced availability of the world’s first six-core server processor with Direct Connect Architecture for two-, four- and eight-socket servers. Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors (code-named “Istanbul”) extend AMD’s commitment to offering server customers superior value at every price point with unmatched platform flexibility.

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.

The most notable change of Istanbul is the addition of a feature AMD calls HT Assist. HT Assist is essentially a probe filter intended to reduce the overhead required for the synchronization of cached data across CPUs in multiple sockets. HT Assist reserves space in each processor's L3 cache, in which it stores an index of where that CPU's cache lines are being used system-wide. The CPU then becomes "host" of the cache lines stored in its directory. If any CPU needs an update about a particular cache line, it will often know which CPU is the correct host to probe for that information. AMD says HT Assist can replace broadcast probe requests (sent to all sockets) with directed requests in 8 of 11 typical CPU-to-CPU transactions. This reduction in probe traffic can yield big gains in available system bandwidth, whose Stream bandwidth increased from roughly 25GB/s to 42GB/s with the addition of Istanbul processors with HT Assist.

Reviews:
Tech Report

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AMD Demonstrates 6-Core Istanbul

Tech Report looked at a demo of the 6-core Istanbul Opteron.

AMD showed several demonstrations of Istanbul silicon in action. The first was a simple showing of Task Manager on the Windows Server 2008 desktop, in which the utility showed activity indicators for each of the 24 cores in a quad-socket system.



The second demo was conducted on a dual-socket system with 12 cores. The main OS was Windows Server 2008, but the system also hosted three separate virtual machines: one each for Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SLES 11 x64. Each VM had four cores dedicated to it.

The third demo was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because it was intended to show how Istanbul can serve as a drop-in upgrade for Socket F systems. The only requirements: the system must support split power planes, and it must have a BIOS upgrade to operate with the new processors. Second, the demo was impressive because it included a performance test. Two otherwise-identical systems were situated side by side: one with a quartet of Shanghai Opterons, the other with four Istanbul chips. Both systems were running with HyperTransport 3 active—a capability coming soon to Shanghai Opterons but not yet available in current products. To illustrate the performance difference between the two boxes, the AMD tech ran a Stream benchmark. The 16-core Shanghai system produced throughput numbers in the range of 25,000 MB/s. The 24-core Istanbul box, by contrast, hit about 42,000 MB/s.

Shanghai:

Istanbul:


Scheduled to launch in the second half of this year, “Istanbul” is expected to be the only x86 six-core processor available for two and four-socket systems and higher.

This video indicates the consistency of AMD's architecture and upgrade from the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors to Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors (Istanbul):



The second video shows Istanbul running on a 2P virtualization platform, highlighting Istanbul's virtualization capabilities:



Thanks to a reader who informed me about those videos :-)

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Opteron 45nm Quad-Core "Shanghai" Available

AMD today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle. With IT decision-makers looking to do more with less, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed “Shanghai”

The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors at the 75-watt ACP ranging from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz are available immediately, with enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors planned to follow in Q1 2009.

“Shanghai” will be a truly global product launch for AMD. A major online and print marketing campaign in support of the launch kicks off today and launch events are happening worldwide beginning today and continuing over the next few weeks.

Anandtech has tested out AMD's "Shanghai" Opteron with a few database tests.

As you've seen, AMD is still competitive with Intel's 3.0 GHz Harpertown in the database workloads that we've shown here. We were quite surprised that Shanghai was able to meet and, in some cases, pass Harpertown at various workload levels in some of the benchmarks. Obviously, when it comes to power, AMD is still leading this space by a significant margin. FB-DIMMs obliterate any power efficiency in Intel's processors, especially when you have eight (or more in some cases) of them present in a server.

"Shanghai" stories:
Computerworld-AMD speeds up, shrinks its Shanghai quad-core
Infoworld-AMD bails out IT
ZDNet blogs-AMD: Does the resurrection start with ‘Shanghai’?
Information Week- AMD Refreshes Opteron With 45nm 'Shanghai' Quad-Core Processors
CRN-First Look: AMD's 'Shanghai' Opteron
Reuters-AMD announces fast, energy-saving chip

Shanghai 45nm wafer:

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85 Server Motherboards and Barebones Servers for Shanghai

More than 85 server motherboards and barebones servers are validated to support the upcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor and are available today. Leading server infrastructure providers including ASUS, Supermicro, and Tyan are currently shipping high-performance server motherboards.

These boards are optimized for OEMs, ODMs, solution providers and business customers to take full advantage of the enhanced power management and virtualization capabilities and unprecedented levels of price/performance-per-watt delivered by the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed “Shanghai”

EE Times believes AMD is back on track with Shanghai.

Advanced Micro Devices is back on track with its latest 45 nm Shanghai processor driving an uptick in sales in high-end server markets, according to a handful of integrators. Longer term, high performance computing (HPC) companies expect to see neck-and neck competition between AMD and Intel as both move to six-core server processors in 2009.

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AMD Barcelona Officially Launched & Reviewed

Today, AMD officially launched the first native Quad Core processor with K10 architecture. Codename Barcelona, it's targeted for Server and called AMD Opteron Quad Core.

It has a new logo and promised to bring improvements such as :

Independent Dynamic Core Technology, AMD CoolCore Technology, Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM), AMD Wide Floating Point Accelerator, AMD Memory Optimizer Technology, AMD Balanced Smart Cache, and Rapid Virtualization Indexing.

Reviews has emerged:

• Tech Report
• Anandtech
• Hot Hardware
• Techware Labs
• PC Perspective

AMD marked the launch of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor with celebratory events in venues around the world, including Bangalore, Barcelona, Beijing, San Francisco, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo. AMD, its customers, channel and ecosystem partners came together to celebrate the unveiling of the world’s first’s native x86 quad-core microprocessor.

Randy Allen (Corporate VP, Server and Workstation Division) discusses AMD's Quad-Core architecture with the launch of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor.



AMD BARCELONA training video has turned up on YouTube:

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