AMD Launches 40W, Six-Core Opterons

Posted 08/31/2009 at 5:00am | by Paul Lilly

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AMD over the weekend added to its Opteron line with a new series boasting six-cores and a low 40W ACP. That's the same power rating as AMD's quad-core chips released in April of this year.

"Unlike other chips manufactured by the competition [Intel Xeon], our six-core Opteron retains certain, much-loved features that are consistent with AMD's quad-core iteration," AMD spokesperson Brent Kerby told TGDaily. "For example, we have not reduced the memory speed, bus support, hyperthreading, or cache size. As such, deployment of the 40W Opteron will undoubtedly extend well beyond Cloud 2.0 and social media environments."

Remarkably, the wattage breaks down to about 6.67W per core. As John Fruehe, Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD, points out in a blog post, single-core processors consumed up to 58W per core just six years ago.

But it's not all about power savings. Compared to AMD's quad-core Opteron, the company claims the new six-core part offers up to 30 percent better performance, while significantly lowering memory investment in Cloud computing servers compared to Intel's Xeon platform.

No word yet on price or availability.

Image Credit: AMD