AMD Launches X-Series Family Of Opteron Processors

AMD's launching a new chip tonight, but it's probably not one you'll soon find in a consumer machine. Instead, the workstation-focused Opteron line is gaining a new member with the X-Series family. It's said to be the industry's highest performance small-core x86 server chip, and they'll go by the codename Kyoto. AMD says they're the highest density, most power-efficient small core x86 processors ever built, with the new X1150 and X2150 chips besting the top-class Atom CPUs in key benchmarks.

The AMD Opteron X-Series processors come in two variants.  The AMD Opteron X2150, which consumes as little as 11 watts, is the first server APU system-on-a-chip integrating CPU and GPU engines with a high-speed bus on a single die. This enables customers to take advantage of leading-edge AMD Radeon HD 8000 graphics technology for multimedia-oriented server workloads.  The AMD Opteron X1150, which consumes as little as 9 watts, is a CPU-only version optimized for general scale-out workloads.


“The data center is at an inflection point and requires a high number of cores in a dense form factor with integrated graphics, massive amounts of DRAM and unprecedented power efficiency to keep up with the pace of innovation of Internet services,” said Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit at AMD.  “AMD has a proud history of server innovation, and the AMD Opteron X-Series processors challenge the status quo by providing unmatched capabilities to drive the most energy-efficient servers in the industry.”

Pricing has yet to be talked about, but that's typically the case on server-class chips that are predominantly sold in business-to-business configurations.
Tags:  AMD, CPU, processor, Opteron