The introduction of the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors (code named “Istanbul”) is big step forward for the IT industry. Dell works closely with AMD to address our customers’ needs with a full line-up of products to help simplify and lower the cost of managing their IT environments. The AMD Istanbul in Dell PowerEdge servers will do just that. We plan to introduce Istanbul in six servers in our portfolio including the PowerEdge 2970, R805 and R905 rack servers and the PowerEdge M605, M805, M905 blade servers.

Virtualization is one of the most effective ways for companies to improve server utilization and improve data center efficiency. A few years ago Dell and AMD collaborated to create some of the industry’s first servers optimized for virtualization, the Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 rack servers. The PowerEdge R905 based on the AMD Opteron processor is a great example of how we’ve fine-tuned our servers to provide virtualization performance. It is an ideal formula of processor technology, massive memory capacity and I/O scalability.

Our customers adopting the new Istanbul platform will see even greater virtualization performance with the new Istanbul processors. In fact, our initial benchmarks show a whopping 38 percent improvement in virtualization performance. We expect to continue to have industry-leading benchmarks for 4 socket servers with Istanbul.

With previous generations of AMD Opteron processors, we have had demand from companies with large data centers that have space and power constraints and from companies that need high availability for large databases. We have good news for these companies: the performance per watt equation just got better. The Six-Core AMD Opteron processors pack tremendous performance increases – we are seeing chart-popping 61 percent increases on SPECint benchmarks – into the same power consumption parameters.

Customers can get six-core performance in the same footprint as with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to run the most compute intensive applications and scale higher while conserving energy. Our customers can get improved performance in I/O intensive applications like databases and technical computing without taking up more floor space, and still operating in the same power envelope. We are pleased to offer companies in industries like high performance computing for geosciences, oil and gas exploration, life sciences and research the AMD technology-based systems they need for performance intensive virtualized applications.

Congratulations AMD on the successful, and early, launch of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

 Armando Acosta is product manager for Dell PowerEdge servers. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Dell testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. 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.