AMD aims for low power servers with new chip

AMD has announced a new range of low power server chips aimed at data centre managers looking to work within a fixed power envelope.

The six-core AMD Opteron EE works at 40 watts and is intended for two processor servers. It is priced at $989 and starts shipping today.

“In past years everyone was just concerned about performance,” said Brent Kerby, senior product marketing manager for Opteron.

“Now we’re seeing a shift from just raw performance into more of a power and cost efficiency area. A lot of this is being driven by applications like cloud computing that need dense computing environments.”

The new processors can be fitted into the existing four-core AMD Shanghai architecture and if done so will give a 31 per cent processing boost without raising the power usage levels.

The company sees the new chips going into a range of application specific data centre configurations, such as for virtualisation or cloud computing.

“Our strategy will be looking at usage based platforms,” Kerby continued.

“It’s not just about getting engineers to put in more cores and throw it over the fence, we’re looking at almost application specific servers.”

He also said that the new server platforms would be built around DDR2 memory, rather than the more advanced DDR3. AMD would most likely transition to DDR3 next year when the price had dropped at acceptable levels and uptake was higher.