With its 45nm production process now in full swing, AMD has announced the release of a low power variant of its popular Shanghai (Opteron) Server CPU.
The "energy efficient" Shanghai sips just 55 watts ACP (AMD"s own energy rating) compared to 75watts of a standard Shanghai and is designed to help meet the industry"s rising demand for low power, cost-saving data center technology and increased virtualization performance.
The new CPU"s range from 2.1 GHz – 2.3 GHz. They all have 4 cores and feature 512 KB of L2 cache per core and 6 MB L3 shared cache. That"s three times as much as in the last generation Barcelona Server CPU.
The release of the new CPU"s comes on that back of so-so quarter for AMD. They started well with the introduction of the Phenom II release, but then reported yet another loss of the quarter making it the 9th quarterly loss and announced 1100 job and pay cuts
Intel"s Nehalem Server CPU is expected to be released sometime around March, although with the continuing Credit Crunch it"s expected that this timeframe may slip.