DRESDEN, Germany – June 18, 2008 – At the International Supercomputing Conference, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that its AMD Opteron processors have helped deliver many of the top performing supercomputers in the world. For the first time ever, AMD technology plays a role in the number one supercomputer in the world and this same processor technology that helps drive the number one supercomputer is also readily available for business and personal computing.

“This current TOP500 list, with its first ever petascale performance, not only represents a milestone in scientific computing but also demonstrates the relevance of scalability and balanced system design in high performance computing (HPC). It also points to heterogeneous computing as an emerging and necessary step for the industry,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computation Solutions Group, AMD. “AMD and its many supercomputing partners, including top tier OEMs, recognize that for heterogeneous computing to be successful, collaboration among industry leaders is critical. The performance demonstrated on this list by AMD and our partners exceeds what any single solution has ever been able to achieve and we believe this tightly coupled innovation will become more prevalent to the benefit of HPC, as well as business and personal computing customers.”

Beyond helping drive the number one system to its record-breaking petascale performance, six additional multi-core AMD Opteron processor-based supercomputers ranked in the balance of the top 20, including the much-anticipated “Ranger” system from Sun Microsystems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and several of Cray’s well-known HPC installations. In total, 11 of AMD’s OEM customers have achieved a TOP500 ranking based on AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture in 11 countries worldwide.

The AMD Opteron processor-based “Ranger” supercomputer at TACC made its first appearance on the TOP500 list, ranking fourth with a score of 326 teraflops. “Ranger” is based on Sun Microsystems’ Constellation blade system and is the most powerful supercomputing system in the world for open science research, helping solve massive computational problems from weather prediction and climate modeling to genetics and medical research.


3 of the Top 5 systems and 7 of the Top 20 systems depend on AMD innovation

Top 20 showing for AMD Opteron processors outpaces any other x86 processor architecture by almost 2:1