AMD Torrenza - Open Hardware Continues

Hot on the heels of my discovery of the OpenSparc initiative of Sun, I've come late to yet another open hardware party - AMD's Torrenza. Torrenza is a "socket compatibility" technology, where AMD has opened up the design for their Opteron sockets (the CPU technology they use for servers and other high-end uses) so that other "silicon designers" can design and build in a preexisting x86 environment with supported motherboards and chipsets that will already be in production, with resulting savings in economy of scale.

(x86, for anyone that isn't entirely familiar, is the basic processor architecture for just about all CPUs currently produced for consumers today. The x86 title stems from the early chips which would be most familiar to people as the old 286, 386 and 486 processors produced by Intel. The 86 nomenclature was eventually dropped in favour of names that could be trademarked (eg Pentium, Athlon) but as the basic architecture has remained the same, the x86 designation has remained to describe the family of processor technologies. While there have been a range of additions to the architecture such as AMDs x86-64 (among others) which changed the architecture from 32bit to 64bit, the basics are still the same, even with new multi-core processors)

While Torrenza was first announced back in June 2006, it's in the news again this week as AMD announced their plans for Torrenza with a range of partners including Sun, Cray, IBM and Dell. I'm still undecided as to whether this is a forward-thinking, strategic move from AMD to make sure that their motherboards become first choice through providing greater choice of processors, or if its a move of desperation as they battle to maintain market share in the server market.

Not being tapped into the scene in any shape or form, I guess I'm just going to have to wait and see.