AMD Aims For Consistency With New Istanbul Six-Core Opterons

"Our competitor does a great job of de-featuring the product line as you move down the stack," said John Fruehe, AMD's director of business development for server/workstation products, tongue firmly in cheek as he introduced five additions to AMD's growing family of 45-nanometer, six-core Opteron server processors code-named Istanbul on Monday.

The new six-cores include three "highly efficient" or HE processors in two-, four- or eight-socket flavors, with average power draws of just 55 watts, and a pair of 105-watt "special edition" or SE chips that forgo thermal concerns for raw power.

All five of the new Istanbul parts feature AMD's full array of tools, including Rapid Virtualization Indexing, Tagged TLB, Extended Migration, Smart Fetch, Power Capping and CoolCore. Fruehe's backhanded compliment aimed at AMD's Santa Clara, Calif.-based rival was a reference to Intel's newest Xeon server processors -- the chip giant's lineup of Nehalem-class parts in its new Xeon 5500 and 3500 series features technologies such as TurboBoost and hyperthreading, but only in some processors at the top of the lineup.

AMD is attempting to differentiate itself by including its full suite of features in all its new releases, "regardless of the power band, clock speed or price," Fruehe said.

AMD's three new six-core HE chips deliver an 18 percent performance-per-watt boost over the standard 75-watt Istanbul parts released June 1, according to the company. The trio includes the 2.0GHz Opteron 2423 HE priced at $455, the 2.1GHz Opteron 2425 HE at $523 and the 2.1GHz Opteron 8425 HE at $1,514 -- all prices for 1,000-unit quantities.

The 105-watt SE chips released Monday include the 2.8GHz Opteron 2439 SE for $1,019 and the 2.8GHz Opteron 8439 SE for $2,649. These special edition Istanbul processors provide a 50 percent performance boost over the standard-issue six-core Opterons released in June, according to AMD, and are designed for high-performance computing.

The HE products, meanwhile, will be joined before the summer is out by even more energy efficient six-cores in the 40-watt range, Fruehe said. This tracks with AMD's previous scheduling of its first 45nm Opteron product rollout, the quad-core Shanghai family introduced last fall, which includes 40-watt parts designated "extremely efficient," or EE.