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Andy Grave

10/07/13 11:31 AM

#123459 RE: mas #123453

from neolib on SI

these sound like still intel cpus

Verizon Taps AMD's Sea Micro Servers
Rick Merritt
10/7/2013 08:00 AM EDT
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SAN JOSE, Calif. — Verizon has agreed to use AMD's SM15000 servers in seven of its global datacenters, becoming the largest customer for the systems AMD acquired with the startup Sea Micro in February 2012.

AMD did not disclose many details about the deal but called it a validation of the unique virtualization capabilities in its proprietary interconnect chips.

Andrew Feldman, general manager of AMD's server group and former chief executive of Sea Micro, told us its I/O chip supports dedicating processor, memory, and storage resources to virtual machines in more robust and fine-grained ways than the competition. The lack of such capabilities has deterred most businesses from using public cloud computing services, he said. "To date in the public cloud, other [users] can impact your performance -- that's unacceptable in the enterprise, and Verizon saw this."

The so-called Freedom Fabric used in the Sea Micro chip ultimately will appear in merchant server SoCs from AMD, but the company has not said when. Feldman suggested versions of the Sea Micro servers using AMD x86 and ARM SoC will ship as early as next year. The servers currently use Intel x86 processors.

AMD said that the SM15000 systems (which it launched in September 2012) could be used in five other Verizon datacenters in the future.