AMD Challenges Intel with New Chip, Rapid Expansion

It seems some of the major storage vendors are starting to look beyond Intel. The chipmaker has some very ambitious plans to expand in areas where its market share is relatively small (namely mobile), though it’s seeing competition heating up in its home turf at the same time.

This week Advanced Micro Devices debuted the new 16-core Opteron 6200 chips family. They’re about 30 percent faster than their 12-core predecessors, the Opteron 6100 line-up, and the fastest x86 server chips on the market.

Computerworld had the specs:

“The five 6200 chips — 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE — run at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz, and are priced between $523 and $1,019. The chips draw between 85 watts and 140 watts of power and will plug into existing server sockets to replace older 12-core chips.”

The long-anticipated win can be considered as a rather big one for AMD, especially considering the fact the new offering has some strong early stage support from some of the biggest vendors.

Electronics giant Hewlett-Packard unveiled its new HP ProLiant G7  servers yesterday, equipped with AMD Opteron processors: The P ProLiant BL465c G7, HP ProLiant BL685c G7, HP ProLiant DL385 G7, HP ProLiant DL585 G7 and the HP ProLiant DL165 G. These levrage  2,048cors per rack, and provide a 35 performance increase over the previous generation chips in addition to other price-related advantages.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, HP rival Dell also announced a new product powered by AMD’s powerful new CPUs.  The Dell PowerEdge R715 features twin 16-core AMD Opteron processors and 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM.

It’s important to note that there are more than just two vendors that have plans to incorporate AMD’s latest innovation into their enterprise boxes. IBM has also come up with its own product, and Acer will be launching a refreshed server line-up within a few weeks as well.