[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

AMD is launching the AMD Open 3.0 platform (formerly codenamed ‘Roadrunner,’) a  server motherboard designed to the standards developed by the Open Compute Project. Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs are already evaluating the AMD Open 3.0 as part of their collaboration on the Open Compute Project.

Suresh Gopalakrishnan (Corporate vice president and general manager, Server, AMD): We became involved with the Open Compute Project very early as we saw a pervasive demand for simplified, energy efficient servers. Our goal is to reduce data center power consumption and cost yet increase performance and flexibility– we believe that AMD Open 3.0 achieves this.

AMD Open 3.0, powered by the AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, can be installed in all standard 19” rack environments without modification, as well as in Open Rack environments. The AMD Open 3.0 motherboard is a 16” x 16.7” board designed to fit into 1U, 1.5U, 2U or 3U rack height servers. It features two AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, each with 12 memory sockets (four channels with three DIMMs each,) 6 Serial ATA (SATA) connections per board, one dual channel gigabit Ethernet NIC with integrated management, up to four PCI Express expansion slots, a mezzanine connector for custom module solutions, one serial port and two USB ports. Specific PCI Express card support is dependent on usage case and chassis height.

Pre-production AMD Open 3.0 systems are currently available to select customers. Production systems from Quanta Computer and Tyan are expected to be available through Avnet Electronics Marketing, Penguin Computing and other system integrators before the end of Q1.