Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. announced that it was launching the AMD Open 3.0 platform (formerly codenamed Roadrunner,) a radical rethinking of the server motherboard designed to the standards developed by the Open Compute Project. AMD Open 3.0 enables substantial gains in computing flexibility, efficiency and operating cost by simplifying motherboard design with a single base product to address multiple enterprise workloads, including high-performance computing, cloud infrastructure and storage. This innovative design is optimized to eliminate features typically over-provisioned in traditional server offerings.

AMD Open 3.0, powered by the recently announced AMD Opteron(TM) 6300 Series processors, can be installed in all standard 19" rack environments without modification, as well as in Open Rack environments. The AMD Open 3.0 motherboard is a 16" x 16.7" board designed to fit into 1U, 1.5U, 2U or 3U rack height servers. It features two AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, each with 12 memory sockets (four channels with three DIMMs each,) 6 Serial ATA (SATA) connections per board, one dual channel gigabit Ethernet NIC with integrated management, up to four PCI Express(R) expansion slots, a mezzanine connector for custom module solutions, one serial port and two USB ports.

Specific PCI Express card support is dependent on usage case and chassis height.