Rackspace to Offer New, Energy Efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor

September 12, 2007; 12:25 AM
Rackspace® Managed Hosting, a leading global provider of managed hosting services, today announced it will begin offering the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor to its U.S. customer base. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors continue AMD’s tradition of energy efficiency, performance and virtualization leadership and are designed for a seamless upgrade path for customers already using Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors. “Rackspace has been a long-time, successful vendor of AMD Opteron processors.  Their commitment to continuous performance improvement for their thousands of customers pushes us to deliver industry-leading technology like Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors,” said Patrick Patla, Director of Product Management, Server/Workstation Division, AMD (NYSE: AMD).  “With innovative power management capabilities, increased performance-per-watt capabilities, and scalable performance, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors will help Rackspace create a scalable, secure and high-performance web environment.”

Rackspace will be the first hosting provider to offer Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, which present a native multi-core architecture with all four cores on one piece of silicon, allowing them to communicate more efficiently for improved performance and performance-per-watt. These processors also include power efficiency features like AMD CoolCore™ technology, designed to turn off portions of the processor logic and memory controller when not in use and reduce processor energy consumption and heat generation. Along with Enhanced AMD PowerNow!™ technology, the processors’ advanced performance-per-watt capabilities help lower the energy consumption of a customer’s IT infrastructure while providing optimum application performance.

“We’ve found that AMD Opteron processors are an incredibly reliable platform for customers with multi-threaded applications or heavy database usage,” said Nicolas Keller, director of platform products, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors coincides directly with our GreenSpace initiative of lowering power consumption, which in turn delivers great cost benefits to us that we can ultimately pass on to customers. It is apparent that the processor was designed with virtualization in mind, delivering near native performance on virtualized applications and greatly improving virtualized application performance by allowing virtual machines to manage memory more efficiently.”