Server & Processor News: SeaMicro, AMD, SGI

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the micro-chip industry:

SeaMicro raises $20 million. SeaMicro has raised another $20 million, bringing their total raised capital to $60 million from venture capitalists and strategic partners. The company recently expanded into a 68,000 square foot headquarter in Sunnyvale, CA. SeaMicro also hired Neena Pemmaraju for the newly created position of vice president of Solutions and Technology. The SeaMicro SM-10000 server powered the download portal for the release of Firefox 4, as well as supported several microsites evangelizing Firefox 4. SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman will be speaking at the GigaOm Structure event June 22-23 in San Francisco.

AMD increases reach and powers gaming. AMD announced increased partner adoption of its products, and said that the Opteron 6000 Series platform’s virtualization muscle has been noted in products such as the  Dell PowerEdge R815 and the HP ProLiant DL585 G7. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform’s compatibility with the next generation 16-core processor, codenamed “Interlagos,” has gained the attention of customers in the early adopting world of high performance computing. A vast array of OEMs are powered by the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors, such as Acer, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, and ZT Systems. Last month, Appro Supercomputer Solutions announced the final installation of a new 12,512-processor core Appro Xtreme X, using Opteron processors, and Cray announced the launch of their new production hybrid supercomputing system, the XK6 which contains AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors.  AMD also reintroduced the FX brand for PC processors and platforms at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).  FX-branded products will be geared toward enthusiast PCs and HD entertainment aficionados. Finally, AMD announced their support for Nintendo’s newly-announced Wii U system, as a new way to enjoy HD console gaming entertainment.

SGI adds NVIDIA GPU Options to Altix.  SGI announced availability of the latest NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs in all of its server product lines. New NVIDIA products, including the Tesla M2090 and the NextIO vCORE Express 2090, along with the CUDA Toolkit 4.0, will be available in the Altix UV, the Altix ICE 8400, Rackable, and SGI Prism XL server systems. "Interest in GPU computing is growing fast," said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. "The latest NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU coupled with their CUDA Toolkit 4.0 software release brings superior capability into the hands of developers. At SGI, we offer among the most extensive options available for GPU programmers, from access to large shared memory in our Altix UV line to the extreme flexibility offered with our Rackable rackmount line, and everything in between."