AMD Unveils New Opterons

AMD said integration of its PowerNow technology into three new Opteron processors it unveiled Monday could generate savings of between 33 percent and 75 percent when the CPUs are deployed in servers. The result, AMD contends, is a "cost differential" of as much as $85,410 per year in its high-end processors that include the technology, when compared with the annual cost of running processors that don't have PowerNow capabilities.

The three Opteron processors rolled out Monday include the Opteron 852, 252 and 152 processors. They also include AMD's Direct Connect architecture, an on-processor design that the company said eliminates bottlenecks on the front-side bus.

"It's much more than just a performance statement from a Gigahertz perspective," said Pat Patla, director of server and workstation marketing at AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif. "This is really a major update to the AMD Opteron line."

Server makers Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are both expected to unveil systems based on the new AMD chips.

Executives from both AMD and its rival, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, have said a top priority in 2005 will be to introduce significant power-consumption savings into their technologies. Intel's proprietary technology for doing so is dubbed SpeedStep.

AMD said pricing for Opteron 852, a four-way server chip, will be $1,514 in 1,000-unit quantities; Opteron 252, a two-way server chip, will be priced at $851 in 1,000-unit quantities; and Opteron 152 for workstations, which will not be available until April, will be $637 in 1,000-unit quantities.