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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j3pflynn who wrote (135869)	10/11/2004 9:30:26 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

Here is official AMD story: Company Success Stories - Microsoft Treasury Microsoft’s Treasury Experiences Performance Boost With Financial Risk Management Applications after Switching to the AMD Opteron™ Processor Profile Microsoft Treasury "Securing greater memory utilization for our Barra 32-bit application by switching to AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems and Microsoft’s® public Beta version of Windows® Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems, gave us performance gains without having to recompile a single line of code." -Max Giolitti, Microsoft Treasury Customer Profile Microsoft Treasury is in charge of managing the financial assets and the foreign currency exposure of the world’s most successful software company. Microsoft Treasury assets total more than $60 billion dollars and are invested in a wide range of fixed income and equity assets. Due to the continuing success of Microsoft and the resulting growth of assets managed by the treasury, the task to measure and analyze the risks associated with the treasury’s global investment strategy has become a highly formalized and complex process. Treasury managers rely on sophisticated applications to estimate the financial risk associated with factors such as foreign exchange, equity and fixed income. Challenge The Barra TotalRisk System applications used by Microsoft Treasury to manage risk for its financial portfolio are based on “Monte Carlo” techniques, which are statistical simulation methods used to do complex numerical computations. The combination of the size and global investment strategy of Microsoft Treasury, and the sophistication of the Barra applications used to process the innumerable risk factors, requires high performance computing capability. One of the most prevalent problems experienced by Microsoft Treasury is having the ability to access enough memory to handle all the assets at once, especially when running up against the maximum addressable limit of 4 gigabytes (GB) of virtual and physical memory in a 32-bit architecture. “When the number of instruments you are analyzing starts increasing, you may need more memory than a 32-bit architecture can provide,” said Max Giolitti, Group Risk Manager for Microsoft Treasury. “In 32-bit mode the OS footprint takes up 1 GB of memory by itself. Running 32-bit applications on the 64-bit extended system gives us the 1 GB of application addressable virtual memory back. ” Solution Microsoft Treasury added to their existing cluster new servers running the public beta version of the Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems. The new 64-bit servers are comprised of 4-way and 2-way AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers based on AMD64 with Direct Connect Architecture. Direct Connect Architecture with HyperTransport™ technology eliminates the need for a front-side bus and directly connects the memory controller and I/O to the processor as well as connecting processors directly to processors in multi-processor environments. The AMD Opteron processor gives the Microsoft Treasury managers the ability to simultaneously process more data. Thanks to the 64-bit capabilities of the AMD Opteron processor, Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit Extended Systems is able to address more than 4GB of virtual memory, as well as allocate a separate memory space for itself and allocate each 32-bit application its own 4GB address space. The extra virtual memory available to the application allows access to larger, more complex data sets. “Before using the AMD64 computing platform, sometimes we would have to split up financial holdings before running the program, to avoid overloading the 32-bit system. Now, we can load all the data sets and still run the application as it was designed to operate. And best of all, we didn’t have to re-write a single line of code,” said Giolitti. Impact Microsoft Treasury was able to scale out its cluster, reducing the amount of time required to run its risk analysis software from 40 hours to 13 hours, representing more than a 325% increase in overall system performance. “Initially we only wanted to be able to access more memory, but we were also able to take advantage of the performance boost,” said Giolitti As a side result of the success with its AMD Opteron processor-based system, Microsoft Treasury has helped to spread the word about their experience of the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 to large financial institutions that use similar risk management applications. “The financial engineering manpower of large asset managers such as Microsoft Treasury helps validate the tool’s computations. In being one of the first large asset portfolios to successfully use 64-bit computing to run risk assessments on the beta Windows Server 2003, we are hoping to help other organizations begin to migrate their own systems to 64-bit Windows,” said Giolitti. About AMD AMD (NYSE:AMD) designs and produces innovative microprocessors, Flash memory devices and low-power processor solutions for the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries. AMD is dedicated to delivering standards-based, customer-focused solutions for technology users, ranging from enterprises and governments to individual consumers. For more information, visit www.amd.com. amd.com