AMD will release on Monday three new Opteron chips for servers -- the Opteron 852, 252 and 152 -- that sport a number of enhancements over existing models. The chips run at 2.6GHz, as opposed to the 2.4GHz chips AMD has been selling. The HyperTransport links, which shuttle data between the processors and other devices, have been sped up from 800MHz to 1GHz.
Just as important, the chips contain PowerNow with Optimised Power Management, which lets the operating system slow the processor's clock speed and consequently reduce power consumption, said Ben Williams, vice-president of AMD's server microprocessor business unit.
HP will announce its plans to use the 252 in a blade server at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston on Monday.
"Data centre real estate is not getting bigger," Williams said. "Cooling costs and electricity are going up."
AMD has included PowerNow, adopted from its notebook chips, in server chips since the middle of last year, but the software to take advantage of it is only coming out now. Customers who bought PowerNow-enabled servers last year can update their software to activate the feature.
The three Opterons come with a thermal ceiling, or maximum power consumption rating, of 95W, Williams said. A comparable Xeon has a similar ceilling, but Opteron chips come with an integrated memory controller, something Xeon doesn't have. Memory controllers add about 20W, giving AMD an advantage, he said.
AMD will also come out with low-power versions of the three chips, with thermal ceillings of 55W and 30W, later in the year.
Intel also has a line of energy-efficient server chips. The chipmaker will release the Irwindale version of Xeon, which doubles the amount of high-speed cache memory to 2MB compared with existing "Nocona" Xeon models, the sources said.
That the two companies compete in the server market is still a somewhat new phenomenon. AMD had a negligible presence in servers two years ago. Now it has about 6 percent of the market for server chips and counts Sun and IBM as customers. Roughly 40 percent of the Global 400 has installed Opteron servers, Williams said.
The main difference between the three Opterons comes in what kind of servers they get used in. The 852 is made for servers with up to eight processors, while the 252 and 152 are designed for, respectively, servers with two processors and with one.
The new chips are the first Opterons made on the 90nm process. Also arriving in these chips will be the SSE3 instructions Intel added to its chips last year to speed multimedia operations such as decoding video.
