AMD: Servers should have fridge style power ratings

AMD says that the IT industry needs to create a standard that makes it possible to easily compare the power efficiency of servers.

Speaking to IT PRO, Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions for AMD, and one of the experts on server virtualisation, said that the IT industry needs to make it easier for companies to find out how green a server is.

One of her suggestions was for equipment, whether it be servers, desktops or laptops, to have a sticker rating on them in a similar way a to consumer devices such as a fridge.

"We need a strategy to measure power efficiency and to do that you need certain standards in place," said Lewis, "We need best practices to tell companies how to measure power and where to measure it".

Lewis admitted that measuring the power of a server is difficult as it doesn't always run under the same load. "Alternatively, we should have an average power rating, like the average miles per gallon consumption rating on the car".

Lewis said that AMD was well ahead on green issues, pointing out that it is a founding member of the Green Grid, an organisation that looks at best practices in data centre power management. She also observed that you need to look at the whole server rather than just the processor.

"We were paying attention to it long before. We're very committed to driving performance up but keeping the power envelope the same. However, it's hard to talk about the green issue from just the processor point, it's just a component."

Lewis pointed out a number of ways its processor design was green, citing features such as Independent Dynamic Core, that turns off processor cores when they're not being used, and Cool Core, which can shut down floating point units when not being utilised.

Lewis said AMD architecture was optimised for power consumption on the core level, the internal level and the platform level. She also stated that it was very optimised for virtualisation thanks to AMD-V, AMD's extensions to the x86 architecture that give it hardware support for Hypervisors,

"We're maturing the x86 architecture, so it's a good candidate for virtualisation."

Lewis stated that the AMD architecture was very suited for virtualisation as its integrated memory controller means that it dealt very well with the memory intensive requirements of virtualisation, compared to Intel, whose current Xeon line uses a front side bus to connect to memory.

However, when quizzed how it would compete once Intel also moves to integrated memory controller architecture at the end of the year with Nehalem , Lewis was less assured.

"We don't know how we will compare at this stage as Nehalem isn't here However, Intel's move proves that our architecture was right, and with HyperTransport we have a proven technology," she said.

"Partnerships are key. When you buy a server, you want good technology, and established relationships. It's an important leg we're starting on."