Stefan Mileschin

AMD has announced a new series of Opteron chips for microservers. Based on the new Jaguar core, X-series 64-bit Opterons will go toe to toe with Intel’s Atom based server parts.

The Opteron X1150 and X2150 compare rather favourably to Intel’s Atom S1200 chips in most respects. Although they cost a bit more, at $64 and $99, they are significantly faster than Intel’s S1260, which costs $54. The Opterons pack four CPU cores, as well as 128 integrated CGN graphics cores. They have more cache than the Atom S1260, they support faster DDR3-1600 memory and more of it, 32GB versus 8GB on Atoms.

The only downside seems to be power consumption. The X1150 is clocked at up to 2GHz and it consumes as little as 9 watts of juice, while the 1.9GHz X2150 needs 11 watts. The Atom S1260 is a 6W part, but then again performance per watt seems to be on AMD’s side. Although the X2150 has a lower clock, it also has integrated graphics, resulting in a somewhat higher TDP.

AMD also has some other perks to boast about, such as SATA3 support, integrated USB 3.0, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs and a more advanced pipeline architecture. With all that in mind, AMD shouldn’t have any trouble finding eager customers - Hewlett Packard is already on board. HP will use X-series Opterons in future Moonshot servers.

However, Intel’s next generation Atom chips are just around the corner and they could once again trump AMD’s offering.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-ro...d-server-parts