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Monday 13 October 2008
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|NewsletterMicroprocessors and DSPs
AMD co-processor firm eyes Microsoft and Google servers
Monday 12 March 2007
Californian developer of co-processors for high performance computing DRC is flirting with the idea of adapting its technology for the commercial server farm market and, some years down the line, to PCs.
DRC currently has a co-processor chip which sits alongside AMD Opterons for very high performance applications such as seismic search, financial industry number-crunching and biomedical applications. However, it could be quickly adapted to server farm applications.
“Our technology is excellent for three things: search, sort and compress, where it can accelerate processor performance by a thousand times,” Larry Laurich, CEO of DRC, told EW.
That would make it particularly suitable for the server farms of search engine companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Microsoft has said it will have, by the end of next year, an installation in Redmond in the US containing 800,000 servers.
Microsoft has been down to see DRC a couple of times. Asked what they talked about, DRC vice-president for marketing, Clay Marr, replied: “They were kicking tyres, asking how far along the road we are, how easy the chip is to programme.”
Laurich added that it would take six months or less to adapt DRC’s technology to a Windows server application, Asked how soon it would be possible to move from there into PCs, Laurich replied: ”We’d have to scale two orders of magnitude. In two to three years it would start being possible.”
One effect of the DRC co-processor is to reduce the number of servers or computers you need for any particular project by five times. That delivers not only a large capital cost saving, but also a large running cost saving, because power and cooling costs typically run at 20 per cent annually of the cost of a computer installation, according to Laurich.
DRC currently has a co-processor chip which sits alongside AMD Opterons for very high performance applications such as seismic search, financial industry number-crunching and biomedical applications. However, it could be quickly adapted to server farm applications.
“Our technology is excellent for three things: search, sort and compress, where it can accelerate processor performance by a thousand times,” Larry Laurich, CEO of DRC, told EW.
That would make it particularly suitable for the server farms of search engine companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Microsoft has said it will have, by the end of next year, an installation in Redmond in the US containing 800,000 servers.
Laurich added that it would take six months or less to adapt DRC’s technology to a Windows server application, Asked how soon it would be possible to move from there into PCs, Laurich replied: ”We’d have to scale two orders of magnitude. In two to three years it would start being possible.”
One effect of the DRC co-processor is to reduce the number of servers or computers you need for any particular project by five times. That delivers not only a large capital cost saving, but also a large running cost saving, because power and cooling costs typically run at 20 per cent annually of the cost of a computer installation, according to Laurich.
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