New AMD Opterons are good news for schools

AMD, a company that has been struggling to compete meaningfully with Intel in the last year, announced new "highly efficient" quad-core processors for blade and rack servers. With energy costs increasing drastically (and no relief in sight), schools looking to shave costs, as well as green their IT departments, can make use of centralized computing solutions that save energy and reduce management costs.

Rack and blade servers with 2, 4, or 8 of these processors can drive entire labs (or multiple labs) with a fraction of the power consumption of standalone desktop deployments. New virtualization technologies and mature hypervisors increasingly allow centralized thin client solutions to provide users with a very desktop-like experience.

According to InformationWeek,

"Our new quad-core AMD Opteron HE processors were designed to help datacenter managers who see power consumption and virtualization as the keys to solving their overall performance equation," said Randy Allen, corporate VP and general manager of AMD's server and workstation division, in a statement.

While few schools have full-blown datacenters, the shift in focus from raw performance to energy efficient models of computing can certainly save schools money in the long term; often, schools can realize short term savings as centralized computing frequently brings lower acquisition costs to the table as well.