Technology giant and chip maker Advanced Micro Devices announced the availability of three members of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor family that the company said address the rising demand for balanced systems with increased performance but also greater power efficiency for cloud computing and Web-serving environments.
The 55W ACP Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are currently shipping for two-, four- and eight-P systems and are available starting July 13 in new systems from Hewlett-Packard. Systems from additional OEMs are expected to come to market throughout the third quarter of 2009, according to AMD. The processors meet the market demand for highly scalable, power-efficient systems that are especially well-suited for Web-serving and cloud computing workloads, the company claims.
Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager of AMD's server business, said since the company's initial introduction of multicore processors for the server market, it's been AMD's mission to help IT managers reduce data center energy costs without compromising performance. "These new lower-power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors feature the highest performance per watt that we have brought to market, and help drive down power consumption while addressing the shifting cloud and Web landscape of today's data center," he said. "And with six cores of compute power and Direct Connect Architecture, these processors deliver no-compromise performance."
The Opteron, AMD's x86 server processor line, was the first to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture (ISA), part of the computer architecture related to programming such as native data types, memory architecture, and interrupt and exception handling. Opteron combines two key capabilities in a single processor: native execution of legacy x86 32-bit applications without speed penalties and native execution of x86-64 64-bit applications.
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"Customers are using HP ProLiant G6 server solutions, which offer up to 45 percent better performance than previous generations, enabling customers to get more value out of their IT dollar," said HP Vice President of Marketing for Industry Standard Servers Jim Ganthier. "The combination of HP ProLiant G6 server technology and Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors provides customers with powerful and energy-efficient technology for a superior return on their server investment."
The HE processors are available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P technology features and I/O capabilities as the standard power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors. The new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor offers up to 18 percent lower platform-level power consumption over the standard wattage version, such as with the AMD Opteron Model 2435, and it also delivers up to 18 percent better performance per watt compared with the Quad-Core Opteron processor Model 2376 HE. AMD is also unveiling two full-featured Six-Core AMD Opteron SE processors at 2.8GHz for 2-, 4- and 8-P systems.
Alex Yost, vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group, said his company is all about innovation and, since 2003, IBM has worked closely with AMD to innovate with AMD Opteron processors in its System x and BladeCenter offerings. "IBM has collaborated with AMD to offer the LS42, the only scalable blade server in the industry that can grow from two sockets to four sockets, protecting client investment," he said. "We will also introduce the new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor in our System x3755 server, including our innovative three-socket implementation that helps clients save cost and get competitive performance compared to four-socket servers."
