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AMD Finishes Off Quad Cores with Budapest Opterons
Published: June 10, 2008
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Advanced Micro Devices last week finally finished getting its quad-core Rev F lineup of processors into the field with the delivery of the "Budapest" Opteron 1300 series of chips for single-socket workstations and servers. The Budapest chips are going to make some server makers, who have built machines based on the 940-pin AM2 socket, very happy and the single-socket boxes are one place where AMD can point to market share gains for its Opteron lineup, despite Intel's two-year onslaught.
The Budapest Opterons are functionally equivalent to the quad-core "Barcelona" 2300 and 8300 series of processors for two-socket and four-socket and larger servers, except they have fewer HyperTransport links and the electronics for the NUMA-style shared memory processor clustering removed. Each Budapest chip has 512 KB of L2 cache per core and 2 MB of shared L3 cache per chip, just like the Barcelonas. There are three different Budapest chips. The Opteron 1352 runs at 2.1 GHz and costs $209 each in 1,000-unit quantities; the Opteron 1354 runs at 2.2 GHz and costs $255 each; and the Opteron 1356 runs at 2.3 GHz and costs $377 each. That extra 200 MHz is probably not worth the extra $168 for most customers; that works out to an 80.4 percent increase in price for an extra 9.5 percent of performance. Customers are seeing performance boosts in the range of 50 percent compared to dual-core Rev F Opterons at the same clock speed, which is about what you'd expect moving from dual-core to quad-core chips.
The Budapest chips have the same PowerNow and CoolCore technologies that other Rev F Opterons have to conserve energy. PowerNow does frequency scaling for cores as workloads change, while CoolCore allows the Opteron processor to automatically turn off (rather than slow down) unused portions of the chip to save juice and cut down on heat. The Opteron chips also have features that allow core clocks to run at different speeds on the same chip, depending on workload needs, and dynamic power management to cut down on the electricity used by the integrated memory controllers, which have been split with the Budapest and Barcelona designs to allow different memory banks to be managed separately to conserve energy.
The Budapest chips, however, do not come in low-voltage, energy-saving Highly Efficient, or HE, variants, and are only in the standard 75-watt thermal envelope parts for single-socket Opterons. According to Steve Demski, Opteron product manager, AMD has not received sufficient interest in low-energy parts to warrant sifting through the bins to find chips that can run at the normal clock speeds at a lower voltage. AMD also used to have a super-low-power Opteron variant called Extremely Efficient, or EE, and these parts have been pushed into an embedded products division where end user customers can't buy them. There are not EE variants of the Budapest or Barcelona parts, and considering the focus on energy efficiency in the data center these days--and the increasing focus on HE parts for the Barcelona chips--this seems like an odd choice for AMD to make. But, AMD is under financial pressure and has not been able to generate a large premium price for the HE and EE parts--at least not as large as it thought it would four years ago. Some work is not worth the money, apparently. Then again, Intel is getting its Xeon parts down into the 50 watt range, and sometimes you do what you have to do to compete and win deals.
One server maker that has been caught flat-footed by the delay in the delivery of the quad-core Opterons is supercomputer maker Cray, whose "Red Storm" and kicker parallel supercomputers are based on the single-socket implementations of Opterons. A year ago, Cray blamed its expected revenue shortfall in 2007 on delays in getting quad-core Budapest chips into the field for its XT4 supercomputers and the rollout of its XT5 designs, and a little more than a month ago--surprise, surprise--after AMD announced a less-than-impressive technical roadmap for the future Opteron processors, Cray announced a new partnership with Intel for future supers. Cray will still sell and support Opteron-based supers, of course, since the Intel-Cray partnership will not bear fruit for years. But the deal still hurts AMD as much as the original Opteron win for the Red Storm super back in 2002 helped. In any event, AMD is happy to point out that the XT4 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded to the Budapest parts and is delivering 260 teraflops of peak performance. (The Budapest and Barcelona chips can do a peak of four floating point operations per clock cycle, which means a single chip has an aggregate of 9.2 gigaflops per core and 36.8 gigaflops running at 2.3 GHz.)
According to Demski, Dell is immediately putting the Budapest chips into its PowerEdge 105 tower server and Hewlett-Packard is putting the chip into the ML115 G5 tower server and its XW455 workstation. IBM has not announced plans for the Budapest 1300 series of chips yet, and Sun Microsystems, which sells two-socket and larger "Galaxy" servers using Rev E and Rev F Opterons, has not yet launched a box using an AM2 socket. But if it wants to be a volume player, it should, and it should also seriously consider making smart tower boxes, too. "We have been banging on all the doors of the server makers to get them to do 1P towers," says Demski, who agrees with this assessment.
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Why File-based System Backup is your Best Bet
File-based, Full System Backups Create Advantages Over Image-based Backups
File-based backups used for system recovery have been around for years. And, until recently, file-based meant a long, painstaking, manual process capable of turning off even the most meticulous system administrator. Image-based backups, then, seemed to solve this problem by eliminating the need to deal with recreating partitions, filesystems, volume groups or other details related to the system's storage configuration. In an image-based restore, the storage configuration and data from the original system are restored as a whole to the new system. While this method produced fast recovery times, Linux administrators began to realize disk image backup was more of an alternative method with its own set of problems and limitations than an answer to the challenges of manual, file-based backup.
Limitations to Disk Image Backup
Since disk image backups make no distinction between files and instead backup the hard drive as a group of sectors, bare-metal recovery can be quick and easy by simply rewriting a duplicate image onto a new, identical disk drive. A fine solution, as long as the old system and new system are indeed identical in types, sizes, locations- basically the exact same hardware. Any differences in hardware, however, could render an image backup unusable.
Many system administrators know first-hand the frustration caused by the inflexibility of image-based backup. "What I hear time and time again from clients is that they switched from image-based backup to file-based because of the limitations they encountered when trying to restore a backup onto different hardware." said Manuel Altamirano, Storix Software Director of Sales and Marketing. "Administrators assume they will have access to identical hardware after a disaster or for migration when the time comes. Unfortunately, so often this is not the case. Companies are left with unplanned, excessive downtime."
Even more advanced disk image backup products, that offer alterations to disk partition tables, still fail to understand more advanced and increasingly common storage configuration tools such as the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or Software RAID (meta-disks) that also must be altered to match new hard disk configuration before data can be restored. In these cases, users must manually alter and build the configuration, usually through command-line utilities and manual editing of configuration files. This also requires users to have knowledge on how to make a system bootable. Rebuilding a system using a disk image backup requires experienced Linux administrators and could take days, weeks or longer resulting in crippling downtime for an organization.
Advances in File-based Backup
File-based backup tools today can automate the process of recording every aspect of a system separately such as disk, filesystem and boot loader configuration while supporting all popular Linux storage configuration tools (i.e. LVM and Software RAID). This detailed backup information is used to greatly simplify the recovery of a failed system from scratch, even if hardware differences are detected on the new system. Furthermore, systems rebuilt from the ground up using file-based backups often times operate better than the original because there is virtually no fragmentation when the restore is completed.
Flexible recovery based on file-based backup
File-based backup products have the ability to reconfigure disks, partitions, filesystems and other storage solutions to fit onto new hardware. This ability to adapt a backup to fit new hardware or alter the system's storage configuration is called "Adaptable System Recovery" or ASR. Only backup solutions that gather details about the original system have enough information and flexibility to make the ASR process of altering configuration so simple even novice Linux administrators can quickly perform the recovery. Once new configuration is completed, data files from the backup are easily restored onto the new hardware. Finally, the system is made bootable based on the new hardware.
The revolutionary adaptability of ASR found in file-based backup tools creates further added value for system administrators because these products can now be used for far more than just reactive tasks such as disaster recovery.
Applications for ASR:
Reactive
- Disaster Recovery- restore systems in minutes after a crash, even if hardware is not the same as the original
Proactive
- Provisioning/cloning- a single backup "golden image" can be used to provision different systems, even if disks, adapters or other elements are not the same.
- Storage software migration- change configuration on the same system for improved performance and availability
- Hardware migration- install the same system onto newer or virtual systems
New system backup management features
Products using file-based system backup have not neglected to consider a system administrator's daily backup responsibilities. These products now incorporate functionality for backup management as well as some of the most advanced features seen in backup and recovery solutions for Linux and AIX. Some advanced features designed to simplify daily backup management for system administrators include:
- Graphical, Web and Command line interfaces
- Local and remote backups to disk or tape devices
- Sequential and random tape autoloader support
- Support for SAN storage solutions
- Tivoli Storage Manager integration
- Oracle database backup support
- Backup data encryption
- Multiple compression levels
File-based Backup Solutions Provide Most Bang for the Buck
Inexpensive products exist that combine both file-based backup management and ASR in one program. Look for a file-based system backup product with advanced features like those mentioned above. In turn, regular backup responsibilities such as automatically verifying backups and encrypting backup data will become much easier. Additionally, combined ASR capabilities greatly reduce downtime and required expertise for both reactive (even bare metal) and proactive recovery projects. File-based system backup and recovery solutions are an economical and more comprehensive option than their image-based counterparts.
About the Author
Anne Stobaugh is an independent contractor working with Storix Software to educate Linux and AIX users on the advantages of file-based backup and recovery solutions.
www.storix.com
www.stobaughmarketing.com
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Editor: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Contributing Editors: Dan Burger, Joe Hertvik, Kevin Vandever,
Shannon O'Donnell, Victor Rozek, Hesh Wiener, Alex Woodie
Publisher and Advertising Director: Jenny Thomas
Advertising Sales Representative: Kim Reed
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May 31, 2008: Volume 10, Number 22
May 24, 2008: Volume 10, Number 21
May 17, 2008: Volume 10, Number 20
May 10, 2008: Volume 10, Number 19
May 3, 2008: Volume 10, Number 18
April 26, 2008: Volume 10, Number 17
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