Sunnyvale, Calif. — AMD marked the fourth anniversary of the Opteron processor by announcing widespread availability and pricing for the top of the line model 2222 SE for two-way servers and 8222 SE for eight-way x86 dual-core server processors.
The new CPUs, which each have 1MB L2 caches, run at 3Ghz and have a maximum power consumption of 120 watts.
The processors are available in several platform configurations from tier one OEMs, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.
“Today’s announcement further demonstrates AMD’s commitment to delivering excellence and represents continued innovation along the customer-directed path we blazed four years ago,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice-president of AMD’s server and workstation business. “We provide the complete x86 processor architectural standard others in the industry are trying to emulate and we have planned a seamless upgrade path to native quad-core for delivery to the market in mid-year,” he said.
AMD also disclosed updated performance projections for its upcoming native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, code-named ‘Barcelona.’ Based on the latest SPECcpu2006 benchmarks using pre-production CPUs, the company believes it to have up to a 50 percent advantage in floating point performance and 20 percent in integer performance over Intel’s highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency.
