For the past year I have been the public face of the AMD Opteron™ processor, defending it against our competition and holding in a deep, dark secret that I couldn’t share until today – how great it really is.

Spending a large part of my life, blogging, communicating in online forums, speaking at events, all left me conflicted.  We have a GREAT product and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, but we don’t disclose the details until launch for competitive reasons.  Well, the gloves are now off because today we launched the new AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors.

These are the world’s first 8- and 12-core x86 server processors, and have a host of new features, including 4 memory channels, HyperTransport™ technology 3.0, a fourth HyperTransport technology link for better processor-to-processor communication in 4P servers, and new power management features that allow us to double the cores, and achieve up to double the performance (compared to our previous generations), without having to double the power or the cost.

Performance – For a long time I have been telling people that performance is not the only factor in deciding on a server.  As a matter of fact, I often said it was the least important factor.  Many interpreted this to mean “we’ll be slower.”  Actually, we perform better, but I will still stand by my belief that while performance is important, for 95%+ of the servers bought, it is not the main driver behind the purchase.

To give you an idea of how we perform, relative to our competitor, let’s start with SPECint®_rate2006, which is always Intel’s favorite benchmark to showcase performance.  Here, we are showing higher integer throughput with our AMD Opteron Model 6174 processor versus our competitor’s top of the line 2P Xeon X5680.

You may notice that I chose to compete with one speed lower than our top performance processor because we don’t need to top speed to win. We are not only higher performing than their top speed part, but we are 88% faster than our previous generation processors.

Shifting gears to floating point performance, here we see that we are 21% faster than our competitor’s top 2P product (and again, this is not AMD’s fastest processor.) Best of all we are a whopping 119% faster than our 6-core previous generation processors (formerly codenamed “Istanbul”).

You’re probably wondering why we wouldn’t put our highest speed processor up in this comparison. It’s because we realize that while performance is important, it is not the most important factor in server decisions.  In most cases, we believe price and power consumption play a far larger role.

Power consumption – Note that to get to the performance levels that our competitor has, they had to utilize a 130W processor that is not targeted at the mainstream server market, but is more likely to be used in workstations. Intel isn’t forthcoming on their power numbers so we don’t really have a good measurement of their maximum power, but their 130W TDP part is being beaten in performance by our 80W ACP part.  It feels like the power efficiency is clearly in our court.  The fact that we have doubled cores and stayed in the same power/thermal range compared to our previous generation is a testament to our power efficiency.

Price – This is an area that I don’t understand.  Coming out of one of the worst economic times in recent history, why Intel pushed up the top Xeon X series price from $1386 (for the 5500 X series) to $1663 (for the 5600 X series) is beyond me.  Customers are looking for more, not less for their IT dollar.  In the comparison above, while they still can’t match our performance, they really fall short in pricing.  At $1663 versus our $1165, their customers are paying 42% more money for the luxury of purchasing a slower processor.  This makes no sense.  Shouldn’t we all be offering customers more for their money, not less?

In addition to our aggressive 2P pricing, we have also stripped away the “4P tax.” No longer do customers have to pay a premium to buy a processor capable of scaling up to 4 CPUs in a single platform.  As of today, the 4P tax is effectively $0.  Well, of course, that depends on you making the right processor choice, as I am fairly sure that our competitor will still want to charge you a premium for that feature.  I recommend you don’t pay it.

As a matter of fact, a customer will probably find that a 4P server, with 32 total cores (4 x 8-core) based on our new pricing, will not only perform better than our competitor’s highest end 2P system, but it will also do it for a lower price.  Suddenly, it is 4P for the masses!

Yes, with these new processors and the new AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series platform, will change the world. At least that’s how I see it, let me know what you think.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing 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.