Market-Ready AMD Torrenza Solutions Push Accelerated Computing Into Mainstream

AMD today announced expanded industry support and customer adoption of AMD “Torrenza”, the company’s accelerated computing initiative designed to help technology partners deliver open, flexible and scalable silicon designs. Torrenza solutions significantly boost performance in compute-intensive applications designed for industries like securities and life sciences, as demonstrated today at the HPC on Wall Street Event in New York. Here's the full press release:

Industry-leading AMD technology partners including HP, ACTIV Financial, and RapidMind, among many others, are delivering market-ready “Torrenza” solutions today in which discrete accelerators and customer-specific silicon enhancements combine to create energy-efficient, high-performing and scalable solutions for accelerated computing environments. These Torrenza-enabled solutions are currently available for the Second-Generation AMD Opteron™ processor platform, which offers a seamless upgrade path to Quad-core AMD Opteron processor-based systems, ensuring investment protection for these accelerated solutions.

“ACTIV Financial’s customers include the leading Wall Street institutions and for these customers, microseconds of time lost in algorithmic trading can have serious financial impact,” said Frank Piasecki, president, ACTIV Financial. “The AMD Torrenza initiative has formed a tremendous ecosystem of hardware vendors offering leading edge co-processing technologies. We’ve found our customers are exceedingly happy with the benefits that a hardware-accelerated solution such as our ActivFeed MPU can offer to improve critical software performance. Hardware acceleration is a technology that’s fairly new to financial services, but the benefits are clear, and it’s definitely in play.”

Said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division, AMD: “The number of technology partners building on the AMD Opteron processor ecosystem by capitalizing on Direct Connect Architecture with their own solutions demonstrates that the industry recognizes the potential of accelerated computing. As computing demands exponentially grow, the keys to success are new models of increased computational performance that simultaneously alleviate cross-industry pain points like power consumption and infrastructure complexity. AMD is dedicated to enabling these cutting-edge performance models by arming Torrenza partners with a superior processor architecture and stable platform that is the basis for accelerated computing advancement.”

“Power efficiency continues to be one of the key drivers in IT decision making,” said Crawford Del Prete, senior vice president, International Data Corporation. “AMD is delivering impressive performance benchmarks with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and its Torrenza-enabled solutions, such as design-specific FPGA-based systems, can offer additional power efficiency. Those combined technologies present wide-ranging possibilities for the industry, and will serve key roles in the advancement of accelerated computing technology as a whole.”

AMD initiated Torrenza to enable dynamic development on a stable platform, enabling technological differentiation that is not economically disruptive at a time when accelerated computing is moving from research centers to the mainstream. Utilizing Direct Connect Architecture and trusted AMD64 technology, AMD’s technology partners are building upon its existing infrastructure to deliver forward-looking solutions to market faster and more cost-effectively. AMD’s technology leadership positions customers to take advantage of accelerated computing in their data centers today.

“We clearly see the technology benefits – both in application performance and server consolidation – that AMD’s Torrenza initiative offers our customers,” said Mike Gill, vice president of ProLiant Servers, Storage and Networking in the Industry Standard Server Division at HP. “Select next-generation HP ProLiant Servers with the Quad-core AMD Opteron processor will support HTX cards, enabling end users to deploy customized acceleration solutions within their current or future data center infrastructure."

AMD’s Torrenza initiative further drives innovation by serving as a key building block in AMD’s long-term accelerated computing strategy. For instance, AMD’s collaboration with RapidMind represents the next step in processor-level, and ultimately silicon-level, integration.

“The RapidMind software platform lets software organizations leverage multi-core processors with minimal impact on their development costs and timelines. The resulting applications can harness the full potential of the latest multi-core processors from AMD, seamlessly taking advantage of acceleration technology available with Torrenza solutions,” said Ray DePaul, president and CEO of RapidMind Inc. “By leveraging the RapidMind platform, organizations can run more complex and therefore more accurate computational models up to 30 times faster.”