In its traditional manner of unveiling new processors without any notifications to general public, Advanced Micro Devices is expected to release faster dual-core AMD Opteron chips aimed at servers on Monday, the 26^th of September.

According to various web-sites that cite AMD’s executives, on Monday the world’s No. 2 maker of x86 microprocessors, who has been competing against market leader Intel Corp. for nearly three decades now, will formally introduce AMD Opteron processors 180, 280 and 880, which operate at 2.40GHz and are aimed at 1P, 2P and MP machines respectively. The chips may outperform all the rest x86-64 microprocessors currently available across a wide array of benchmarks.

AMD dual-core Opteron microprocessors integrate 2MB of L2 cache, dual-channel PC3200 memory controller and are designed for 1000MHz HyperTransport bus. Typical AMD Opteron processors with two processing engines feature 95W thermal design power. So far the top speed of dual-core Opteron chips has been 2.20GHz, whereas single-core products’ highest performing model operates at 2.80GHz. 

The new Opteron processors with two cores are to be made using 90nm process technology and are drop-in compatible with appropriate Socket 940 or Socket 939 infrastructures.

AMD Opteron 880 is expected to cost $2649, the model 280 is projected to cost $1299, whereas the model 180 is claimed to be available for $799. All prices are effective for 1000-unit quantities. AMD usually formally announces availability of its processors when it is ready to ship them for revenue, which means that actual end-users would be able to buy the actual product a number of weeks after such announcement.