AMD announces five Opterons for high-scale applications

AMD has launched five server chips in the Opteron 6100 Series processor family.

The five new processors, announced on Monday, vary from eight to 12 cores with clock speeds of between 1.8 and 2.6GHz, bringing the Opteron 6100 family count to 15 processors.

"These new server CPUs deliver greater performance than we've ever had before," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager for AMD's Server Business, in a statement.

The 6180 SE processor is the highest-performance chip in the range with 2.5GHz clock speed, 12 cores and a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 105W, and is aimed at finance and massively virtualised datacentres.

Two processors — the 6132 HE and 6166 HE — are targeted at scalable, power-efficient systems, such as those used in web serving and cloud computing. The processors have clock speeds of 2.2GHz and 1.8GHz, and eight and 12 cores respectively, both with a TDP of 65W.

Two more processors — the 6140 and 6176 — are targeted at the main server market, with clock speeds of 2.6GHz and 2.3GHz, and core counts of eight and 12 respectively. Their TDP is 85W.

All the processors have 12MB of shared L3 cache and 512KB of shared L2 cache per core.

AMD acting chief executive Thomas Seifert was critical of AMD's server performance in the company's end-of-year earnings. "We were disappointed with our performance in the [server] segment in the fourth quarter," he said at the time.

Dell previewed a 96-core PowerEdge server in tandem with the announcement, made by its Dell Data Centre Solutions division. The PowerEdge C6145 server is designed for the latest Opterons and can support two independent four-socket server nodes in a two-rack unit (2U) chassis with up to 1TB memory. It has 10 Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe) slots and can support up to 12 3.5-inch and 24 2.5-inch hard disk drives.