Open Source Processor Development from AMD

An AMD press release today details AMD’s plans to put its Torrenza initiative into the public domain.  The idea is to create an industry standard CPU socket architecture with all necessary specifications available to the public.  This will allow third party companies, and even interested hobbyists to develop their own processors that can be used in the “Torrenza Innovation Socket.” This idea has been met with great support by AMD’s corporate partners including Dell, Cray, Fujitsu Siemens, IBM, Sun and HP.

“This next phase in the Torrenza initiative would not be possible without the enthusiasm and desire of our partners to enable open innovation and greater collaboration across the computing ecosystem. Together, we recognize that the impact of Torrenza can be far-reaching across the industry in reducing complexity for customers while increasing the pace of innovation both in silicon and platforms. Datacenter managers will immediately recognize the impact of the Torrenza open environment, and benefit from the enhanced cooperation at the platform level, with new levels of platform stability, upgradeability, flexibility, and capabilities for their server infrastructure.”
—Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD

The new architecture will allow for customization of multi-processor systems for specific needs, rather than forcing conformity to the AMD64/X86 architectures.  Tech companies could create custom processors, or even just co-processors connected over AMD’s high speed HyperTransport for specific server applications, games, multimedia enhancement, etc.  It is no surprise that IBM is on board with this initiative as it somewhat lends itself toward the versatile Cell architecture. I myself am amazed at what open source has done for software, let’s hope it can do the same for the hardware side as well.

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