AMD today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle.
Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed Shanghai.
"Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers," said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. "In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future. This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world's first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago. Simply put, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right technology at the right time."
The enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:
• Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
• A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java.
• DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
• Upcoming enhancements to the AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.
The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors ranging from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz are available immediately, with enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors planned to follow in Q1 2009.
Upcoming 45nm Desktop Processors AMD also plans to bring this higher-performance and more energy efficient 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in Q1 2009 with the AMD platform codenamed "Dragon." This platform will be the second generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first generation AMD "Spider" platform released in 2008. The AMD "Dragon" platform is designed to harness the power of fusion by optimizing the performance of new 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with award-winning AMD 700 Series chipsets and award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.
