By IANS
Bangalore : A day after its global launch, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a leading chip-maker and Intel’s rival, Tuesday unveiled here its quad-core microprocessor Opteron for a range of servers used by data centres and enterprises in the subcontinent.
Designed and developed to provide higher performance, power efficiency, enhanced virtualisation and upgradation, the 65 nanometre (nm) x86 processor is aimed at reducing the total cost of ownership for users.
“The Opteron processor-based servers, rolled out by global OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and system integrators, has shown about 50 percent increase in energy efficiency, enhanced virtualisation performance, investment protection when upgrading from dual code using the same power (watt) to reduce IT infrastructure costs,” AMD marketing director Michael O’Brien told reporters at a preview of the new product.
The $5.3-billion US firm plans to introduce the desktop version of Opteron by mid-December for medium and large enterprises, ISVs (independent software vendors) and telecoms.
The OEMs and system builders such as Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun shipping the Opteron-powered servers to their customers worldwide.
“We have worked with partners and customers to design a range of processing solutions with Opteron processor-based systems based on next-generation architecture,” O’Brien pointed out.
Along with Opteron processors, the company has introduced the average CPU (central processing unit) power (ACP) metric to assess power usage, including cores, integrated memory controller and hyper-transport technology links.
“ACP enables data centre operators to estimate power budgets to size their data centres. We will also provide thermal design power specifications to platform designers in our datasheets as an industry standard,” AMD India managing director Alok Ohrie noted.
With data centres worldwide facing the potential of doubling their energy consumption by 2011, the new processors are meant to deliver better performance using less power.
For the domestic market, Ohrie said HCL and Wipro have decided to use Opteron processors in their next-generation servers and hard-sell the product to upgrade the existing servers of their enterprise customers across verticals such as banking and financial services, telecoms, data centres, research labs and public utility service providers.
AMD’s Opteron launch comes five days after the world’s largest chip-maker Intel Corporation unveiled its quad-core Xeon processors in 7300 series, designed for multi-processor servers and high-end desktops.