"Barcelona" Power Efficiency

Total system performance is about more than pure speed. Today's densely-packed datacenters depend on tremendous electrical and thermal overhead, and today's enterprises directly benefit by reducing that overhead when possible. As a result, performance-per-watt is an increasingly important server metric.

For the past three years, AMD has been at the forefront of performance-per-watt processing technology. Power management technologies built into the AMD Opteron™ processor, like AMD PowerNow!™ technology, can reduce the amount of power and cooling needed to perform computational tasks when full processor power and performance isn’t necessary - for cooler and efficient datacenters. And with AMD’s native quad-core solution, ‘‘Barcelona’’, our performance-per-watt benefits should be better than ever.

Like all AMD64 processors, ‘‘Barcelona’’ processors have an integrated memory controller for each processor. However, ‘‘Barcelona’’ allows the power requirements of each memory controller to be managed separately from the cores, a feature we call Dual Dynamic Power Management. Furthermore, ‘‘Barcelona’’ processors allow each computational core operate at different clock speeds, which can reduce power consumption and thermal output during varying computational workloads. ‘‘Barcelona’’ processors are also unique with their advanced logic design clock gating – which can be seen as ‘intelligent power control.’ Unlike Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors, ‘‘Barcelona’’ processors can power down unused areas of logic in the processing cores and memory controller to help better manage power.

Each of these architectural enhancements are designed to translate into improved power management through finer, more granular control. With "Barcelona" processors, enterprises can match server performance and electrical consumption even more closely to exact workloads than ever before. Servers with lower workloads can reduce their electrical consumption and thermal output automatically, scaling up the performance only when required.

The many benefits of performance and performance-per-watt improvements with Barcelona include:

Improved performance for sophisticated system layers like virtualization and security
Simplified manageability
Lower total cost of ownership
Optimum processor performance
Platform longevity through socket and thermal envelope consistency

How much power could you be saving in your data center?

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Power Estimator

Thanks to its unique native multi-core design, the AMD Opteron processor offers industry-leading performance-per-watt to help keep power consumption and operational costs low.