Will AMD’s Latest Six-Core Chips Wow Wall Street?

AMD rolled out its latest six-core Opteron chips today. How will they fare on Wall Street?

Today, AMD introduced its HE and SE six-core "Istanbul" Opteron chips. Will Wall Street IT organizations flock to these new processors?

The SE is designed for performance-oriented customers, such as Street firms performing high-speed analytics. According to Gina Longoria, senior product manager of the server workstation division at AMD, only a small subset — 3-5% — of AMD customers are interested in the pure raw performance of the Opteron SE, which is 52% more powerful than the previous generation Shanghai while consuming the same amount of power. This model is priced $2,649.

The HE model is intended for those seeking to reduce power consumption without giving up much performance. This processor consumes 55 watts, less than the average light bulb. (The SE, by way of comparison, draws 105 watts). According to Longoria, financial services clients were behind this energy efficiency improvement. Not only do many Wall Street firms have overtaxed data centers, she says, but at $5-$10 per watt a reduction of 49 watts per server adds up to $10,000-$20,000 savings per server rack. The HE is priced at $1,514. HP is already shipping Proliant servers containing Opteron HE processors in two-, four- and eight-socket configurations. IBM plans to to offer a System x server based on the new HE. Other OEMs are expected to come to market throughout the third quarter of this year.

"The test for AMD will be to show significant measurable performance and efficiency gains that offset the Intel 5500 chip and specialized processing appliances such as those from Tervela, Datapower, and Tibco," says Tony Bishop, CEO of Adaptivity.

Although AMD has had benchmarking organization SPEC run some tests, to date they've only been against its own earlier-generation Shanghai chips.

These new Istanbul SE and HE chips have the same AMD-V virtualization and AMD-P power optimization features that are contained in other Opteron chips. These should be particularly popular in cloud computing projects, Longoria says, for which virtualization and resource sharing are important.