AMD unveiled their new Opteron 4000 series (“Lisbon” platform) and Firestream coprocessor today. AMD has a particularly good slide that summarizes most of the other slides in most of the other “here’s our new cloud datacenter product” decks that I’ve seen in the past few weeks.
The 4000 series is AMD’s first server processor family to target the 32W, 50W, and 75W per node power bands, and AMD claims that the 32W 4162EE and 4164EE have the lowest power per core of any server processor on the market as of launch. This low per-core power puts the 1.8GHz 4164EE at the top of the 4000 series price range, at $698. At the bottom of the series price range is the 75W, 2.2GHz, four-core 4122, for $99. Clearly, AMD is not pricing these parts on anything like raw performance, but on efficiency.
The new Opterons are based on pretty much the same microarchitecture that AMD has been using for some time now, so there’s nothing new there. AMD has focused most of its efforts for Lisbon on getting the platform’s overall power down and its scalability up.
