Advanced Micro Devices on Monday added one new processor into its lineup of chips with six cores. The new central processing units consume just about 40W and are designed for low power servers that still require high performance.

“The AMD Opteron EE processor enables OEMs to deliver energy-sipping servers that don’t compromise on power management, virtualization or performance features.  It is specifically designed to help address the challenges that are generating a great deal of discussion these days - building and running very dense data centers for Web services, while doing more with less,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager of server and workstation division at AMD.

The only six-core AMD Opteron chip with 40W wattage is model 2419 EE that operates at 1800MHz, features 6MB of L3 cache and is designed for dual-processor servers. The processor is made using 45nm silicon-on-insulator process technology. According to AMD, the Opteron 2419 EE delivers up to 31% higher performance compared to quad-core AMD Opteron 2384 (2700MHz, 75W), hence, the new chip can hardly be considered as a performance champ.

AMD explained that many customers requiring very low power six-core processors to deploy dense, large-scale IT projects where system power trumps raw performance and every watt of power savings can have significant positive impact on the bottom line.

The chipmaker did not reveal pricing of the Opteron 2419 EE chip, but said that the processor is currently being integrated in custom solutions programs and will be available from system builders for cloud and Web 2.0 customers.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Istanbul, 40W, 45nm