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AMD Shines the Spotlight on Latest Quad-Core Opteron

Paul Lilly — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:04:37 -0500

AMD has its head in the cloud, and that may not be such a bad thing. The chip maker this week released another Opteron 1000 Series processor, codenamed Suzuka, with performance per watt and compatibility taking center stage.

"The flexibility of four cores and a low-cost infrastructure gives customers an edge when designing for a cost-effective or power-efficient platform," John Freuhe, director of business development for server and workstation products at AMD, wrote in a blog post.

Suzuka, which was designed for cloud computing, Web servers, small business servers, and other applications where lower power consumption is the primary focus, runs at 2.9GHz with 6MB of cache. And because Suzuka is based on the same core as Shanghai, existing AM2 platforms should only need a BIOS update to run the chip.

Image Credit: AMD

New Energy Star 5.0 Specifications Initiated

Paul Lilly — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:45:41 -0500

It was on July 20, 2007 that the Energy Star 4.0 computer specifications came into effect, which was most notable for including requirements for power supplies that met the standards of the 80 PLUS program. As of yesterday, all around requirements have become a little more strict as the new Energy Star 5.0 specs go into effect.

Any computer product (game consoles not included) manufactured on or after July 1, 2009 must meet the Version 5.0 requirements to qualify for the Energy Star certification, even if models were originally qualified under the 4.0 specifications. Making it a little tougher this time around, a computer's power supply must have an 85 percent minimum efficiency at 50 percent of the rated output and 82 percent minimum efficiency at 20 percent and 100 percent of rated output.

Full Version 5.0 Computer Specification (PDF)

Image Credit: EPA