Where are the Opteron X Series C/APUs?

On May 29, 2013 AMD announced the launch of the Opteron X-Series family of processors, namely the Opteron X1150, and the Opteron X2150. At the time of this writing, it looks like only the latter survived.

For those of you searching for these chips, and boards to run them on, I hate to disappoint you, but:

I was in contact with someone at AMD, and was told that these chips are currently being sold to partners only, and are not in the consumer channels at this time. Whether they will become available to consumers later is not known. Bummer Fisherman.

This means you can technically buy them, but only as part of an HP ProLiant m700 Moonshot server cartridge. Of course that is going to cost a wee bit more than the $99 MSRP given for the X2150 chip. How much more? Rougly $37,000. That cost reflects the minimum purchase of "15 identically configured Moonshot m700 server cartridges." (source). Double Bummer Fisherman.

So for now, I won't be building my NAS server with Opteron parts. Instead, I will probably start with an HP ProLiant N54L, and do a few upgrades.

CES 2014: AMD Kaveri Tidbits

"It's the most wonderful time of the year..." OK, aside from the Polar Vortex as of late, for all us tech junkies it's a special time of year because CES is upon us! This year AMD has unveiled their new chip, Kaveri, and though there was not a lot of new info (no benchmarks publicly available yet), there are a few particularly interesting details.

A while back AMD joined The Document Foundation, offering to help refactor the code for LibreOffice Calc. Essentially what the folks at LibreOffice have accomplished since then is to leverage the hardware found in AMD systems (in particular, the GPU, or in the case of Kaveri, the APU) to do some very heavy lifting. Exactly how much the new hardware and code improved performance was revealed at CES:

Humorous AMD Video

With CES looming, and news of AMD winning the International CES Innovations 2011 Design and Engineering Award for its Fusion APU, I have to say I am pretty excited to see Fusion finally coming to fruition.  Anyway, since Fusion is upon us, here is a funny new promotional video from AMD about fusion; watch for AMD President & CEO Dirk Meyer at the end:

Excellent AMD Bulldozer Blog

Many of us have been patiently waiting for the release of the AMD Bulldozer processor. As the date draws nearer, more details about the chip are starting to emerge. Today I came across this interesting blog, Patent based research regarding AMD's future MPUs. The title gives a little idea of what the blog is about, but keep in mind that there is more there than patent research. Indeed, there is a lot of info there.  The author also comments on the AMD Llano and Bobcat processors.  Check it out for yourself!