With today’s focus on "green IT" and energy efficiency, it’s no wonder that the interest in low power processors continues to grow. Even when AMD (and a handful of very insightful customers) could see that low power computing was the future, we couldn’t anticipate how rapidly cloud computing, "twin servers" (2 motherboards in a single chassis), and small form factor servers and blades would become top of mind for many IT managers. These innovations, combined with the strong role of virtualization in the data center, are all telltale signs that the world is going to continue demanding more efficient solutions.

And the economy today? Do you really believe that any IT director wants to stand in front of the CEO and explain why they are not taking the steps to reduce power consumption in the data center? Even small and medium businesses are affected by the rising costs of energy and with the increasing sense of shared global responsibility for conserving energy, it is becoming a key performance initiative for many IT Managers.

When we introduced the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (codenamed "Shanghai") last November, customers were excited to find that in many cases, those standard power processors could actually consume less power than the existing low power Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. What could be better than that? How about even lower power? Or even greater performance? Today, we’ve announced two new "Shanghai" processor categories: the AMD Opteron™ HE processors – designed for energy efficiency and the AMD Opteron SE processors – designed for the highest raw computing environments.

Energy efficiency is something that we work to design into all of our processors. We are even bringing a new feature to the market called AMD PowerCap manager that will allow IT datacenter managers to set predefined maximum limits for the processor’s clock speed and voltage, allowing a flexible solution for holding down energy costs. Because many workloads tend to be spiky in nature, the need to run at the highest clock speed is often only for a cycle or two. Power capping helps smooth out the peaks and can help maintain a better overall average power. In fact, AMD PowerCap manager can reduce server processor power consumption by up to 63%. And our AMD CoolCore™ technology, which lets you turn off unused parts of the processor, is now extended to include L3 cache.

Power efficiency has to be accompanied by performance. Our new processors today offer the potential to both consume less power and deliver better application performance. But what does "better performance" really mean? When the focus is on energy efficiency, better performance means helping you recognize a savings while your apps operate the same or better. How does this translate for businesses?

Take a look at the progression of energy efficiency in quad-core processors, and you can easily see that between our 65nm "Barcelona" processors and our new 45nm "Shanghai" processors, the overall power consumption, at both load and idle, had been steadily moving downward. Now compare that with the cost of power and you can see that as costs of power continue to rise, the AMD Opteron processors can be your best hedge against increasing costs in the data center.

If you’re asking yourself what do these comparisons really mean, consider this simple statement: using the exact same platform, an upgrade from the highest performing low-power "Barcelona" processor to the 2.3 GHz "Shanghai" HE processor can deliver up to 44% better performance to power ratio. That’s pretty significant. To reiterate, it’s not just the power savings, its power savings combined with performance that delivers a compelling business solution.

Then it’s quite clear that our advancements today can help IT managers in their quest for increasing computational muscle, while decreasing costs.

I encourage you to also take a look at what our OEM customers are saying. Rackable Systems has blogged about the new processors and Dell makes a guest appearance at our AMD at Work blog. Also, check out a new video detailing the benefits of the "Shanghai" HE processor and how it address the challenges of the datacenter.

AMD’s philosophy of giving you the power of choice comes through loud and clear in these latest product offerings. Whether you need a balanced, energy efficient processor that helps ensure you are optimizing your energy consumption without sacrificing performance or your performance hungry application demands every edge available, AMD Opteron processors give you the choice. The best part is this is all done within the same infrastructure – each processor works on the same platform – ensuring your biggest task is not being an inventory manager for the myriad combinations needed to support your data center, but concentrating on what really matters, satisfying your customers.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.