Posted on Wednesday, December 01 2010 @ 0:07 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD's server business marketing director John Fruehe
revealed the company sees potential for the Bobcat architecture in the server market, but the problem is that the cores have been optimized for the consumer market, and don't include many of the features that would be critical to enterprise users:
While they may not be much use for high-performance servers, cloud computers often require processors that can handle a large number of low-intensity tasks at once. It's also important that the CPUs can power-down during periods when there isn't any work to do. In this respect, a cluster of low-power Bobcat cores seems to make a lot of sense.
However, the problem, as Fruehe sees it, is that Bobcat cores have been optimised for the consumer market. While they may be low power, the CPUs just haven't been designed to include many of the server-centric features that would be critical to enterprise users.
"Although an extremely efficient core, [Bobcat] was designed for low power client solutions, so things like ECC memory and support for server OSs (through the AMD SR5600 series chipset) have not been figured into the product at this time," he noted.
