Ailing chip maker AMD has marked the fourth anniversary of the launch of its Opteron and AMD 64-bit processor technology by launching new dual-core server processors.
The company has also released more details about its forthcoming quad-core processors, which it will be banking on to help retake some of the valuable market share it has lost to arch-rival Intel over the past year.
Codenamed ‘Barcelona’, AMD has claimed that the new processors, based on SPECcpu2006 benchmarks, will command a 50 per cent advantage in floating point performance and 20 per cent integer performance over Intel’s fastest quad-core offering. AMD’s first quad-core chips are due this summer.
Randy Allen, corporate vice president, server and workstation business, AMD, said: “With our native quad-core technology, AMD continues to build off of a consistent architecture and will deliver more than just four processing cores. We believe that our enhanced architecture will deliver increased performance and performance-per-watt without forcing disruptive platform transitions. Investment protection continues to be a central focus of our customer-centric design principles.”
Alex Yost, director, IBM System x, said: “As the first company to embrace AMD Opteron processors in 2003, we are gratified to see the impact AMD has had in the datacentre over the last four years. AMD Opteron processors have been integral to some of our most innovative recent product introductions, including our scalable snap-on blades and Xcelerated Memory Technology.”
The new dual-core processors AMD announced are the Opteron 2222 SE and Opteron 8222 SE, designed for two-way and four-way/eight-way servers, respectively. Both chips run at 3GHz and come with 2MB of Level 2 cache and the same memory controllers and HyperTransport technology found in this series of server processors. AMD maintained that both processors significantly outperform their Intel Xeon counterparts.
The company has also introduced a new tool for IT managers to measure the power efficiency of its processors. The AMD Platform Power Calculator allows managers to compare the estimated power consumption of servers based on Opteron processors of different wattages against rival processors.
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