Earlier today, Advanced Micro Systems released its new line of high-performance and low-power processors, which will be used by companies like Rackable Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell for their servers. The company’s new server processor is mainly an updated version of its 45 nanometer Shanghai processor.
The announcement on the release was received with enthusiasm by the company’s clients, partners and shareholders, as there were certain concerns about its ability to handle the development process as initially scheduled. One of the reasons for this general belief was the delayed release of the quad-core Opteron processor Barcelona back in 2007. One of the reasons for the incident was the company’s fail to provide system vendors with samples, which led to the design flaws to be reported extremely late.
"When we first came to market we brought out the standard power (Shanghai processors) because that's where the bulk of our market is," explained in a recent interview John Fruehe, the director of business development for server/workstation products at AMD. "As always, we follow up fairly quickly with the HE, which are the energy efficient models, and the SE, which are the high-performance models," he added.
The plan was to provide a complete offer, and in order to do this, the company had to add a low-power and a high-performance part to its November 2008’s standard product offer. AMD’s officials explained that these low-power HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1 GHz to 2.3 GHz, were developed to cover a certain segment of the server market "that must maximize performance during peak hours while managing the energy costs during idle and low-utilization hours." The SE high performance processors, running at 2.8 GHz, were designed for the company’s customers with the most performance-intensive datacenter workloads.
Starting today, customers can choose from five Highly Efficient variants of the Shanghai Opterons. The Opteron 2372 HE running at 2.1 GHz is available for $316, in 1,000 unit quantities. The 2374 HE running at 2.2 GHz costs $450 and the 2376 HE running at 2.3 GHz costs $575. For bigger boxes, the company released the 8374 HE running at 2.2 GHz which is available for $1,165 and the 8376 HE running at 2.3 GHz and selling for $1,514. The topper 2386 SE part for two-socket servers runs at 2.8 GHz and can be purchased for $1,165, while the 8386 SE part for four-socket boxes (which runs at the same speed of 2.8 GHz) costs $2,649.
AMD’s plans for 2009 include the release of another 45-nm processor named Istanbul, which will have six processing cores. For 2010, there are two releases planned: the Magny-Cours processor, which will use 12 processing cores and Sao Paulo, which will use six cores.
These efforts are looking to address the tough competition in the high-end multiprocessor system market. AMD’s rival Intel announced the upcoming release of its own six-core processor for MP servers and also plans the switch to a brand new microarchitecture called Nehalem. These new AMD processors are expected to compete with Intel’s 5400 series Xeon processors previously known as Harpertown.
