Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday formally launched its new microprocessors intended for dual- and multi-processor servers. The new chips offer two processing cores, support for more power efficient DDR2 memory, virtualization technology and other improvements.

“Today’s announcement represents continued innovation along the customer-directed path we blazed years ago; we provide the complete x86 processor architectural standard for others in the industry to emulate and have planned a seamless upgrade path to quad-core processors,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, server and workstation division, AMD.

The new AMD Opteron microprocessors use 1000MHz Hyper-Transport bus, socket F infrastructure with 1207 pins, support dual-channel DDR2 memory (PC2-5300 for 2P and MP systems and PC2-6400 for 1P machines), AMD-V (virtualization) technology and contain 2MB of level-two cache (1MB per core). The new chips and their platforms are compatible with quad-core AMD64 central processing units.

Platforms for the new servers will support Torrenza technology, which capitalizes on the direct connect architecture and HyperTransport bus to enable other processor and hardware providers to innovate within a common ecosystem. The enhanced capabilities and innovation options are projected to be available through the extensible system bus via the HTX connector with new AMD socket F (1207) compatible processors serve as the infrastructural underpinnings for advancing AMD64 as the x86 open innovation platform.

Typical flavours of the new AMD Opteron for processors for 2-way (2200-series) or 4/8-way (8200-series) servers have thermal design power of 95W, however, there are also SE and HE versions of the chips with increased clock-speed/power consumption (120W) and decreased energy hunger (68W). New AMD Opteron models for uni-processor servers and workstations consume up to 103W and are designed for socket AM2 infrastructure.

Systems based on the new-generation AMD Opteron processors are to be available from IBM, HP, Sun as well as Egenera, Rackable Systems, Supermicro and others.

“Customers trust AMD for critical server applications, as evidenced by our record Q2 2006 AMD Opteron processor sales, and in 2006, AMD expects to double the number of AMD Opteron processor-based systems offered from global and regional tier-one OEMs,” Mr. Allen added.