AMD Opteron X-Series takes on Intel atom in high-density low-power server market: V3

YEREVAN, May 30. /ARKA/. AMD has expanded its Opteron server lineup with new chips designed for cloud-based services like Facebook and Amazon, which call for large volumes of high-density energy-efficient systems to serve the ever-growing data needs of mobile devices.

Available immediately, the Opteron X-Series is styled as the highest performance small-core x86 processor on the market, competing directly against Intel's Atom S1200 chips. Like the Atom, the Opteron X-Series is set to be delivered in HP's Moonshot servers as well as AMD's own SeaMicro Fabric Compute systems.

However, the Opteron X-Series is all quad-core, delivering twice the performance of the Atom at the same clock speed for single-threaded workloads, according to AMD. It also supports up to 32GB of memory, four times that of Intel's microserver chip.

Those cores are also AMD's next-generation Jaguar architecture, as seen on the AMD 2013 mobility platforms that the chipmaker introduced last week.

The first versions available are the X1150 CPU and the  X2150 APU. The latter also integrates an AMD Radeon 8000 GPU with 128 cores, enabling it to handle highly parallel workloads such as offloading video decoding from client systems.

AMD's new chips are similar to Intel's Atom chips in power consumption and price. The 9W X1150 is clocked at up to 2GHz and will cost $64 in volume, while the 11W X2150 is clocked at up to 1.9GHz and costs up to $99 in volume. However, AMD points out that its chips have twice the number of cores. –0--