Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s second largest maker of central processing units, has started shipping new AMD Opteron HE processors with reduced to 55W power consumption. The new chips are based on the latest incarnation of AMD server processors code-named Shanghai and brings performance improvements to servers demanding power efficiency.

“In the current economic environment, datacenter managers are under more pressure than ever to reduce costs without compromising the latest features or performance. The new quad-core AMD Opteron HE series processor offers unrivaled performance-per-watt and cost-efficiencies for a wide range of configurations without a potential front-side bus bottleneck. In the second quarter AMD plans to take energy-efficiency to the next level in introducing even lower ACP processors for the unique demands of cloud computing environments,” said Patrick Patla, general manager of server and workstation business at AMD.

The new AMD quad-core chips with 6MB of L3 cache made using 45nm process technology and with 55W thermal envelope maintain socket and thermal compatibility with previous-generation chips in socket 1207 form-factor that also utilize dual-channel PC2-6400 (DDR2 800MHz) memory.

AMD has five new Opteron HE in the lineup: 2376 HE (2.30GHz) for $575, 2374 HE (2.20GHz) for $450 and 2372 HE (2.10GHz) for $316 aimed at dual-processor servers as well as 8376 HE (2.30GHz) for $1514 and 8374 HE (2.20GHz) for $1165 designed for multi-processor machines.

Additionally, two new 45nm quad-core AMD Opteron SE processors at 2.8 GHz – 2386 SE and 8386 SE – are now available for customers with the most performance-intensive datacenter workloads for $1165 and $2649, respectively.

The new AMD Opteron HE processors are available already in machines from Dell, HP and Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, the Opteron SE chips are used by HP and some other AMD technology partners.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Shanghai, 45nm, HP, Dell