AMD today announced immediate availability of the AMD Opteron 246 for 2P servers and workstations. This is the first ever AMD Opteron processor using x86-64 architecture and clocked at 2.0GHz. Later this year Advanced Micro Devices will also unveil AMD Athlon 64 processor clocked at 2.0GHz as well as Opteron processor for 1-way and 4/8-way systems with 2.0 and maybe even higher clock-speeds.

AMD Opteron 246 processor incorporates 1MB of L2 cache, 128KB of L1 cache and two Hyper-Transport links for connecting to another CPU as well as to Hyper-Transport tunnels. All Opteron processors integrate dual-channel PC2700 memory controller that can address up to 1TB of memory.

Recently announced results of the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-H benchmark, which measures business-related database queries, confirm the IBM eServer 325 featuring the AMD Opteron processor Model 246 is currently the highest performing system tested on this benchmark for both 100GB- and 300GB-sized databases, AMD said today.

AMD Opteron processor Model 246 is priced at $794 in 1000-unit quantities. All other current official prices unchanged and may be seen here.