If you remember AMD recently bought out Seamicro to help them with some of their interconnect issues they have in both the desktop and server flavors of their CPUs which now that more information is out seems like a response to Intel grabbing up Cray’s for a cool $140 million (considerably less than what AMD paid for Seamicro at $334 Million). The Intel-Cray deal has been in the works for months and if our information is correct pre-dates AMD’s move to buy Seamicro.

Meanwhile the Intel-Cray deal will still leave Cray with the right to use their existing technology and grant them access to improvements and new technologies developed by Intel in the future (as they relate to interconnect technology). This nice little addition to the deal could be a bad thing for AMD as we are certain the any new developments from Cray’s interconnect technology are sure to be very Intel specific; which means AMD could be out at Cray in the future.

For AMD’s part they are saying that the HPC (High Performance Computing) market is not a big part of their business. The problem there is that getting a win in a super computer goes a long way toward getting into other server environments and AMD knows this. Intel knows this too and has always done well in the HPC market especially with recent versions of the Xeon.

The Interconnect technology that both Seamicro and Cray use is a method for allowing different computer nodes to communicate a high speeds (nodes usually have multiple CPU sockets). However, this same technology can be adapted to relate to inter-core communication and inter socket communication. This is the primary reason that both AMD and Intel would be interested in this technology. Having more efficient interconnects at the core and socket level will improve desktop, workstation and server efficiency and in turn performance.

We will be very interested to see what both Intel and AMD make of their new purchases and how they will impact future CPUs and chipset at both the enterprise and consumer level.

Discuss this in our Forum