Advanced Micro Devices announced today that it plans to offer its customers AMD Opteron processors with lowered power consumption in the first half of 2004. The chips will be intended for variety of platforms, including 1-way, 2-way and 4-/8-way applications.

The Sunnyvale, California-based firm will offer both mid-power and low-power Opteron CPUs consuming 55W and 30W of energy respectively. There is no clue about the core speed of the microprocessors, but the idea of AMD64 processors for server and mission-critical applications may be quite interesting and practically accomplishable. As we know, later this year AMD launches Mobile Athlon 64 chips for notebooks. The parts are expected to consume less power than desktop versions of Athlon 64 CPUs, thus, the company has a number of ways to reduce the consumption of its chips even now.

Currently AMD Opteron processors’ total thermal power is about 84.7W, including CPU itself and built-in memory controller.

It is necessary to point out that the market of CPUs with lowered power consumption is expanding substantially nowadays. Enterprise computing systems that require power conservation, such as blade servers and storage devices, are gaining in popularity due to their scalability, ease of management and cost efficiency. In addition, mid- and low-power processors are a requirement for many server systems housed in large computing centers where power consumption and heat affects operating costs.