AMD Releases Four New Quad-Core Opterons

Following a highly publicized setback late last year in its initial ramp of quad-core processors caused by a silicon glitch, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD and OEM partners finally hit the market with B3-revision chips in March.

After splashy launch parties around the globe way back in September of last year, the ramp of the product codenamed Barcelona is finally proceeding apace with the introduction of two new 2.4GHz and two new 2.5GHz parts. The 2.4GHz quad-core Opteron 2358 SE is priced at $873 on AMD's Website, while the new top-of-the-line 2-socket released Monday by AMD, the 2.5GHz 2360 SE, has a price tag of $1,165.

Adding clock speed to its 8-socket quad-core portfolio are the new 2.4GHz 8358 SE, priced at $1,865, and the 2.5GHz 8360 SE, which runs a cool $2,149.

"In the 2-socket space, we're talking about the HPC folks, people doing genome-mapping for instance, where they need every last bit of clock speed and performance from each core," said AMD server chip manager Steve Demski last week.

"In the 8-socket space, the demographic is customers doing the really intense number-crunching against those big enterprise databases."

Demski said AMD expects Sun and Hewlett-Packard, who already offer 8-way servers built on previously released quad-core Opterons, to lead the way with new configurations featuring the 8358 SE and 8360 SE devices.

The new devices are benchmarking particularly well in terms of floating point performance, a traditional Opteron strength, Demski said, but the two new 8300 parts have also nailed the highest SAP-SD two-tier score in eight-socket servers and AMD is touting the 8358 SE and 8360 SE for data center scalability.

AMD also released three new Barcelona processors, codenamed Budapest, for single-socket servers earlier in June, bringing the chip maker's range of quad-core Opteron products a lot closer to the comprehensiveness anticipated last year, before the TLB errata was discovered in the original silicon.

The three single-socket chips that make up AMD's new Opteron 1300 series are all quad-cores, comprising the 2.1GHz Opteron 1352 ($209), the 2.2GHz 1354 ($255) and the 2.3GHz 1356 ($377).