AMD, Red Hat announcement delivers few details

Red Hat and AMD took advantage of the gathering of the faithful at the recent LinuxWorld conference to unveil a partnership that will bring Red Hat Linux to the 64-bit Opteron platform.

The announcement describes Red Hat's plans to support AMD's upcoming Hammer-based Opteron and Athlon processors. For AMD it's an opportunity to step up its foray into Intel territory--the low-cost server market. Intel's 64-bit Itanium CPU is already supported under Red Hat Linux (with Itanium 2 support expected next year). The partnership with Red Hat also gives AMD a chance to tout the advantages of Opteron's dual 32/64-bit architecture--a feature that AMD says will give it a leg up in the migration to 64-bit computing compared to Itanium's purely 64-bit approach. For Red Hat's part, the collaboration offers another way for the company to extend its reach into corporate datacenters while boosting Red Hat's early-to-market positioning in the 64-bit computing arena.

Wayne Meretsky, AMD's Software R&D Manager, claims the Opteron/Red Hat combination will offer enterprises superior performance, scalability, and lower cost of ownership--a familiar mantra intended to rouse enterprise interest. "Fine-grained decisions [were] made as we were evolving the architecture, based on feedback we got from the Linux community," said Meretsky in describing the alliance. He added that Opteron's HyperTransport technology and an integrated memory controller will provide a tremendous improvement in system throughput.

Details on how the Opteron/Red Hat Linux alliance will achieve such performance were scant. While not outlining any specific customization of the OS for AMD's chip, Brian Stevens, Red Hat's Director of Engineering, pointed out that Red Hat for Opteron is ripe for optimization. He said customization will be up to ISVs and the Linux community, implying that his company has no current plans to release an "Opteron-enhanced" Red Hat. Stevens defined Red Hat's responsibility in terms of the open source community, adding that any features or capabilities added to the base distribution will be "driven back to the community effort to support AMD platforms."

AMD hopes to capitalize on Red Hat's early 64-bit experience to enhance its enterprise efforts. AMD cites some success to date capturing a share of the enterprise "edge" market--Web and file servers, for example. The chip producer plans to provide system builders with Opteron reference designs for uni-, dual-, and four-processor configurations, as well as for 1U, multi-U, and likely 3U and 4U rack servers--a move AMD thinks will accelerate adoption and migration to their platform. Stevens expressed AMD's belief that its hybrid 32/64-bit platform will also benefit OEMs, "where with one platform design they wind up with a SKU which plays in both the 32- and 64-bit spaces, which cuts their development costs in half compared to any other approach today."

With few details available, the Opteron/Red Hat story isn't especially compelling beyond the separate--and impressive--specs of each product. Still, the two players are convinced they've formed a winning combination. Bullish on the partnership, Meretsky added, "Red Hat did not come to this platform because they thought it would be "cool," or because AMD paid them. They think there's money under this curve. And that's based, in no small part, on end-user demand. And I think that's going to drive things."

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