SUNNYVALE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—November 12, 2008— AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle.¹ With IT decision-makers looking to do more with less, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed “Shanghai.”

“Flawless execution in bringing the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to market early results in new performance leadership on x86 servers,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “In concert with our OEM and solution provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on their bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future. This enhanced AMD Opteron processor represents the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products since the introduction of the world’s first x86 dual-core processors by AMD nearly four years ago. Simply put, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right technology at the right time.”

Performance Leadership that Addresses Urgent Business Requirements Today

Data center managers are facing escalating pressures from the computing demands of enterprise workloads, like web serving and database applications, and the need to do more with less in the current IT spending climate. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization, which has posted 60 percent year over year growth² in the second quarter of this year, are being rapidly deployed but require a balanced solution. The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors further enhance AMD’s unique Direct Connect Architecture and offer a superior balanced and scalable solution to support today’s increasingly heterogeneous computing environments.

Unsurpassed Virtualization Performance

Through improvements to AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and innovative AMD-Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors build on AMD’s legacy as the virtualization platform of choice, with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor already powering nine global OEM servers specifically designed for virtualization. The new processors deliver faster “world switch” time, which enhances virtual machine efficiency, and feature improved Rapid Virtualization Indexing, AMD’s innovation in AMD-V that reduces the overhead associated with software virtualization.

Unparalleled Price/Performance

The enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:

• Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
• A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java.
• DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
• Upcoming enhancements to the revolutionary AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.

Unequaled Energy-Efficiency

Already offering industry-leading x86 server processor performance-per-watt, 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors draw up to 35 percent less power at idle compared to the previous generation while delivering up to 35 percent more performance, and feature a number of new power-saving technologies. AMD Smart Fetch technology can help reduce power consumption by allowing cores to enter a “halt” state during processing idle times with zero impact on application performance and compliments AMD CoolCore™ technology, which reduces power to unused sections of each processor to further reduce power consumption.

In similarly configured platforms, the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron 75W processor-based platform offers up to a 30 percent performance to power ratio advantage over the 50W processor-based competitive platform. For these platforms, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform only used 138W at Active Idle compared to the Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform using 179W at Active Idle. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2380 processor-based platform had a SPECpower _ ssj ™ 2008 overall 761 ssj _ ops/Watt, (308,089 ssj _ ops @ 100% target load). The Quad-Core Intel processor-based platform had a SPECpower _ ssj ™ 2008 result of 561 overall ssj _ ops/Watt (267,804 ssj _ ops @ 100% target load). ³