NextComputing Adds Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processors to Portable Workstation
Nashua, NH – February 22, 2008 – NextComputing, manufacturers of high-performance mobile computers, announces the incorporation of native Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors into several of the company’s portable designs. The AMD Opteron processor Model 2347 HE operating at 55-watt Average Compute Power (ACP) will be utilized on all of NextComputing’s flextop offerings, including the NextDimension series, as well as on its selected ruggedized Vigor models. Up to (2) Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors can be configured into one briefcase-sized system. NextComputing will be the first to incorporate (8) native cores into a form factor this small. The company’s latest computers are an example of NextComputing’s dedication to innovation in the mobile, high-performance technology world.
According to Bob Labadini, President and CTO of NextComputing, “The adoption of AMD’s native quad-core processor into our flextop lineup provides our end-users with the ability to handle performance-hungry, multi-threaded operations without bogging down the system, to enhance performance per watt, and to maintain all of the other features they have come to appreciate about our lineup, like portability, modularity, and multiple I/O options.”
InfoWorld Magazine recently reviewed Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and found that the newest processor is more than two times faster than its dual-core predecessor. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors save power not through process shrink, but by “turning off or dimming the lights on walkways and in individual rooms that aren't being used.” The “walkway” is the memory bus on each CPU, and each CPU is a suite with many “rooms”: four cores, the floating-point unit within each core, the top 64-bits of a floating-point unit within a core, and so on. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors check which rooms are occupied roughly 2 billion times per second without any help from the OS.
This efficiency of performance is pertinent to the application requirements of NextComputing’s four primary industry targets: broadcasting, military/intelligence, test/measurement, and oil/gas. NextComputing has become an accepted portable and small form factor solution provider for compute-intensive applications within these industries.
“NextComputing’s already impressive lineup of portable, field-ready servers and workstations should see a significant performance boost from the addition of native quad-core processing,” said David Rich, director of High Performance Computing, AMD. “Our shared customers in markets where high performance, small form factors and ruggedized systems are no longer a luxury, but a requirement for business, can take advantage of the latest advancements in scalable, balanced system design.”
Features of the NextDimension Evo HD include up to (17) 2.5" SATA hard disk drives up to 200GB/7200RPM each, up to 16GB DDRAM, internal DVD R/RW, (4) PCIe/PCIx64 slots, multiple I/O ports, and additional RAID internal storage options to over 1TB capacities. Additionally, one or more 10G Ethernet, Quad Gigabit Ethernet and other networking cards can be plugged in for gateway/bridge servers, appliance/data recording and forensics applications.
About Nextcomputing: One of the first in a unique breed of technology companies to specialize in high-performance, small form factor, portable computing solutions, the company invented the flextop, a personal supercomputer offering open standards, modular architecture in a package the size of a small briefcase.
