AMD Announces Open Innovation Platform

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AMD announced that its Torrenza Initiative is serving as a collaborative force toward achieving future processor socket compatibility in the server industry. By leveraging the advantages of AMD64 with Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology, OEMs will be able to standardize on a Torrenza Innovation Socket for many of their current and future server platforms. This game-changing approach to server design will enable OEMs to consolidate server offerings for multiple processors to potentially a single platform, reducing datacenter disruption and deployment costs for customers. The Torrenza initiative is establishing AMD64 as the Open Innovation Platform.

Leading server OEMs that develop silicon or intend to design products uniquely enabled by the Torrenza Initiative, including Cray, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems, have endorsed Torrenza as an open innovation initiative, and plan to evaluate the Torrenza Innovation Socket. The Torrenza Innovation Socket enables OEMs who develop their own silicon to take full advantage of an x86 environment and the accompanying economics associated with packaging, chipsets and motherboard designs. OEMs will be able to contribute to and obtain the Torrenza Innovation Socket Specification and associated design documentation.

Through the Torrenza Initiative, the AMD64 computing platform is opened for industry-wide innovation, such as connecting non-AMD accelerators to AMD64 systems via HyperTransport technology links. Torrenza supports a range of integration innovations from interconnections leveraging HyperTransport, to co-processors accessing HyperTransport, to plug-in co-processors that directly harness the speed and communications delivered by HyperTransport.

Today, 90 percent of the top 100 and more than 55 percent of the top 500 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies or their subsidiaries rely on AMD Opteron processor-based systems. AMD Opteron processors deliver exceptional performance and performance-per-watt to the market because they are built on AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture, innovated to reduce bottlenecks inherent in traditional front-side bus architectures and enable a more efficient approach to computing.

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