AMD offers lower power quad-core Opteron

AMD has unveiled a new low-power variant of the quad-core Shanghai processor, as part of its drive to improve the energy efficiency of the 45nm Opteron chips released last year.

The EE processor, launched on Wednesday, consumes 40W of power, against the 55W of the existing low-power variant, the HE. AMD says an EE-based server would use 13 percent less power than a comparable HE-based system. The EE chip consumes 14 percent less power than the HE in idle mode.

According to Patrick Patla, general manager of the server business for AMD, the EE processor is suited to use in cloud computing, which, he said, "demands both extreme energy efficiency and a balanced system that can handle high transactional demands".

John Fruehe, director of business development for AMD servers, said in his blog that, despite consuming less energy, the EE processor will perform "exactly the same" as the HE. Both processors run at a speed of 2.3GHz.

According to Fruehe, an average server with AMD processors will run at around 115W at idle and around 185W at full power.