AMD today announced the immediate availability of three new members of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor family that address rising demand for balanced systems with increased performance yet greater power-efficiency for cloud computing and web serving environments. The company announced five new Instabul CPUs, three aimed at 2P servers and two at 4P/8P models.

The 55W ACP Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are currently shipping for 2-, 4- and 8-P systems and available today in new systems from HP, addressing the needs of performance hungry and power constrained data centers. Systems from additional OEMs are expected to come to market throughout Q309.

These new processors are available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P technology features and advanced I/O capabilities as the standard power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

The new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor offers up to 18 percent lower platform-level power consumption over the standard wattage version.? (AMD Opteron processor Model 2425 [SPECpower_ssj2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 419,277 ssj_ops, & 221W @ 100% target load] compared to AMD Opteron processor Model 2435 [SPECpower_ssj2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 487,764 ssj_ops & 270W @ 100% target load]).

It also delivers up to 18 percent better performance-per-watt compared to the quad-core version. (Six-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 2425 HE [SPECpower_ssj2008 1228 overall ssj_ops/watt, 419,277 ssj_ops, & 221W @ 100% target load] compared to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 2376 HE [SPECpower_ssj2008 1044 overall ssj_ops/watt, 346,326 ssj_ops & 210W @ 100% target load]).

Processors with even greater energy efficiency are planned to be available later this year, according to AMD.

For higher performance for mission critical workloads such as database and CRM applications, AMD is also unveiling two new Six-Core AMD Opteron SE processors at 2.8 GHz for 2-, 4- and 8-P systems.