Tech

AMD fills out six-core Opteron lineup

AMD on Monday will fill out its six-core AMD Opteron lineup with high-performance and energy efficient versions of the chip. In addition, AMD said demand for its six-core Opterons have been better than expected.

Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor July 12, 2009 at 2:01 p.m. PT

AMD, which launched its six-core server chip in June, is targeting its SE and HE versions to datacenters that need more performance and lower power consumption, respectively.

Six-core AMD Opteron SE processors claim a 50 percent performance boost of the previous generation. The HE processors deliver 18 percent more performance per watt.

Gina Longoria, AMD's senior product manager for servers and workstations, said "demand has been really good" for the six-core Opterons and "higher than expectations." Longoria added that AMD has won a few large deployments and many Opteron quad-core customers are upgrading to the six-core versions.

She classified the six-core Opteron customers as a mix of existing and new ones.

With the HE version of the Opteron AMD is hoping to go after cloud computing and Web 2.0 deployments. Those data centers need the power efficiency in every rack of servers they have.

Here are some key charts in Longoria's pitch:

The HE power consumption: