Azul Systems targets a very distinct environment—network attached computing (NAC). More specifically, the
company's new Vega 2-based 3200 series compute
appliances are designed to replace conventional servers
running J2EE Java applets typically associated with Webbased applications. Systems are designed to handle tens of thousands of transactions.
AVega 2 chip contains 48 cores in groups of eight. It also
features 16 high-speed serial Xlink interfaces. One is used
to connect to a device such as a dual-port Gigabit Ethernet
interface, while the remaining Xlink interfaces are used to
access memory on other Vega 2 chips.
This is similar to AMD's use of HyperTransport. The difference is that Azul
doesn't support switching. An AMD
Opteron can access memory two or
more hops down a change of Opterons.
This simplifies the PCI Express-link
Xlink interface, as well as cache support. A fully populated system contains
768 cores.
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