UPDATED 08:42 EDT / JANUARY 17 2013

AMD Launches Facebook-Inspired Motherboard for Enterprise Workloads

AMD is rolling out a new motherboard designed to run inside specialized servers purpose-built for specific workloads.    The Open 3.0 chipset, codenamed Roadrunner, couples speedy processes with design methodologies developed by one of the biggest web-scale companies around.

The 16” x 16.5” board can fit into 1U, 1.5U, 2U or 3U servers and features two Opteron 6300 processors with 12 memory sockets each. The chipset is touted by AMD as a “single base product” to address multiple types of workloads, and for good reason.

Open 3.0 supports both standard 19” rack environments and the Open Rack specification, a hardware standard developed by Facebook for the purpose of reducing its data centers’ footprint.

Similarly to Google, the social network’s services are powered by simple, energy efficient servers that trade functionality for improved performance and lowered TCO. Unlike the search giant however, Facebook open-sourced its internal breakthroughs and created an entire ecos,ystem dedicated to disrupting the traditional data center paradigm. This initiative is now known as the Open Compute Project.

With the debut of Open 3.0, AMD has become the first major chipmaker to adopt the OCP standard.

“This is a realization of the Open Compute Project’s mission of ‘hacking conventional computing infrastructure,’” said Frank Frankovsky, Chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and VP of Hardware Design and Supply Chain at Facebook. What’s really exciting for me here is the way the Open Compute Project inspired AMD and specific consumers to collaboratively bring our ’vanity-free’ design philosophy to a motherboard that suited their exact needs.”

For the time being, AMD’s newest product is only available to a few select OEMs. Tyan and Quanta Computer are the first on the list – they’re expected to start shipping Open 3.0 servers later this quarter.


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