AMD has rolled out the latest instalment in its new line of Opteron processors.

The quad-core Opteron SE server chips are designed for high-performance four- and eight-socket servers.

AMD hopes that the quad-core chips will offer a "scale up" approach to businesses.

Customers will be able to scale up to more powerful chips rather than purchasing additional server hardware.

"For many customers, the concept of 'scaling up' a data centre has meant a sizeable financial investment in new hardware to gain satisfactory performance during peak workloads," said Patrick Patla, director of AMD's server and workstation business.

"Today, with the performance benefits of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processor, IT managers can improve application performance and scalability of memory and data intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost."

AMD also hopes that the new chips will offer power savings while still preserving a high level of performance.

Opteron product manager Kishna Weaver told vnunet.com that, because the chip was designed with power savings in mind, AMD is able to focus on boosting performance with the SE chips while still keeping energy consumption down.

"There are fundamental things that AMD does to address power, and it is going to be present in every product in the line up," explained Weaver.

AMD will offer the Opteron SE chips in four different models, running at speeds of 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz.

Server vendors planning on offering the chips include Sun Microsystems, Dell, HP and IBM.