Many of you will already be aware of the collaboration between AMD and the Ferrari Formula 1 team - indeed, we've written about it in these very pages previously. Simply put, AMD is far more than just another name on the car: AMD contributes in very real terms to the success of the Ferrari team.
Ferrari has deployed AMD processors and technology throughout its enterprise. That ranges from staff using Turion laptops to check their email, through to massive 400-node Opteron clusters used for modelling fluid dynamics in the wind tunnel. With such a big-name, glamorous sport to be associated with, AMD is keen to make sure people know about the cutting edge work it is doing with Ferrari - because it's interesting as well as effective. To that end, we went off to Mugello racetrack, just outside Florence in Italy, for the official unveiling of Ferrari's new F1 car and to chat to the technicians there about their work with AMD.
Crucial to the team's success is the Opteron processor. Why? Because so much of the car's design and engineering relies on high-powered computing systems. AMD is being used for:
Telemetry: During every race and practice session, data from the onboard computers are sent back from the car to the pit garage. This data needs to be crunched and analysed very quickly so that the engineers can extract race-defining information. Pit stop strategies, tyre decisions and fuel loads are all based on computer simulations of the race extrapolated from telemetry data.
Car design: The precision required to design every millimetre of the car obviously requires a high-powered CAD/CAM programme running on a meaty workstation.
Wind tunnel: Crucial to the speed of the car is the aerodynamics of the wings and the body shape. To test this, the team uses a wind tunnel and then records how the air flows over the car. By recording the airflow, they can work out how to make the car sleeker. This data recording is called Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD for short.
