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AMD today announced a first wave of companies that are "evaluating" the firm's "Torrenza" platform.

Torrenza will provide direct access to an AMD64-based processor via a Hypertransport link. According to AMD, the technology will allow third party hardware developer to integrate their own silicon into a spare socket on a Torrenza motherboard and combine their technology with an AMD Opteron or Athlon CPU. Conceivably, this socket could house co-processors - so-called "accelerators" - that focus on specialized applications such as physics, floating-point calculations, storage or graphics.

One of the first projects that offer some clues on the benefits of Torrenza is "Roadrunner," a supercomputer that IBM will develop for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The system will combine 16,000 Opteron cores in x3755 servers with more than 16,000 Cell processors in Blade Center H units via Hypertransport links. Roadrunner will rely on Opteron CPUs to handle the supercomputer's IO and communication activity while the more complex computation will be done by Cell chips.