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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)

AMD 236.73

-6.1%

Jan 30 9:30 AM EST

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To: rudedog who wrote (257466)	12/21/2008 7:56:59 AM
From: NicoV	Read Replies (1) of 275872

I've mentioned here before that Windows Azure appears to be 100% Opteron right now: Message 25171905 Interestingly, on the PDC Microsoft also hinted that their existing internet services would migrate to using the Azure platform, so that they could reuse all the manageability features of Windows Azure. They gave an example of how Windows Live Meeting could be ported to Window Azure, eliminating all the custom manageability stuff they built in Live Meeting. That means that for Microsoft, the only performance metrics that matter are performance metrics for stuff running in a hypervisor based virtualisation environment. Also interesting is that Microsoft is not seeking the absolutely fastest processors, but the systems that give them the lowest TCO. For Windows Azure, this means that their choice at this moment is 1.5-1.7 Ghz quad core quad socket NUMA systems (presumably ultra low power Opterons). Quite the opposite of 3 GHz Nehalem systems. E.g. the 55 Watt 1.8 Ghz AMD Opteron 8346 HE only costs $523. So you can build a 16 core machine for only $2000 dollar in CPU cost. But you also get 4 sockets that allow for 32 DIMMs, so you put a lot of cheap DDR2 memory in. It's no use having a system with a high amount of CPU power if you can't put in a correspond amount of RAM. For the PDC Windows Azure prerelease, Microsoft is dedicating a CPU and 1.7 GB of RAM for each VM. So most likely they fit each system with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. A 2 socket Nehalem system may have the same CPU power of an quad socket Opteron system, but it will not be able to have the same amount of memory. Basically, Opterons are cheap memory controllers with sufficient CPU power attached to them.

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