Dell gives thumbs up to AMD new Opterons

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The contender claims its server chips are better than Intel’s

Dell is rushing to get new products based around AMD’s new Opteron 3000 family showing the depth of partnership between the chipmaker and the former Intel only shop.

Dell Data Centre Solutions’ Steve Cumings said that AMD was proving to be a great partner and he was excited about the new AMD Opteron 3200 Series CPU.

He said the chip allowed Dell to create a custom design for its DCS customers, which had what he called a compelling combination of performance and energy efficiency.

What was winning Dell over to AMD was the fact that it was offering focused technology within industry standards. The company is currently the leader in the density optimised market so this means that it can create products which fit with customers.

The sorts of customers that Dell is chasing are those that are building their own cloud or web based services and the Opteron 3200 family is designed for those trying to do that on a budget. AMD claims the chips have a 38% better price performance and up to 19% less power per core than its rival, Intel.

The power reductions, which are always a selling point for resellers building packages, also come with a range of server reliability features. This, plus the fact that Dell can point out that the chips are cheap and create servers that are twice the core density per rack, makes a fairly winning combination, he said.

AMD’s Patrick Patla, corporate vice president and general manager, commercial business, suggested that another selling point for resellers is that IT departments are being pressured to become profit centres faster. In other words, if they buy kit they have to make their money back in terms of savings quickly. The Operons 3200s could be sold on the basis that they were true servers sold at a desktop class price.

The AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform is targeted to the dense, power efficient 1P Web hosting/Web server market. There are 4- or 8-core CPU options.

MSI, Tyan, Fujitsu and Dell have all signed up to deliver products based around the new chip which is one of those which use a “Bulldozer” core and Socket AM3+.

On the power side they use 45W to 65W TDP, clock speeds of 2.7GHz base frequency, up to 3.7GHz frequency using AMD Turbo CORE, two DDR3 memory channels supporting ECC UDIMM 1333, 1600, 1866 MHz memory speed and up to 32GB memory capacity.

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