AMD Sets Prices on New Opteron Models

Less that a week after its disappointing first-quarter financial results, Advanced Micro Devices announced April 23 that its latest Opteron models are available.

The dual-core Opteron 2222 and 8222 SE models, which the Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced April 4, will run at 3.0GHz. The two processors also will offer 120-watt thermal envelopes.

On April 23, AMD officially launched the two processors and posted their pricing on its Web site. The 2222 SE model will cost $873 in quantities of 1,000, while the 8222 SE will cost $2,149.

In addition, AMD announced that all major OEMs - Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM - will build systems that use these new processors. Dell has already announced that its PowerEdge 2970 servers will use these processors.

In its call with analysts after the first-quarter numbers were released, AMD maintained that its quad-core Opteron processors - "Barcelona" - remain on schedule for an official release in the third quarter of this year.

The company is hoping that Barcelona gives AMD a much-needed boost as its main rival, Intel, has fought back in the past few months with its own dual- and quad-core processors. AMD has maintained that its quad-core processor will offer a superior design.AMD also is claiming that its quad-core Opteron will outperform Intel's processor by 50 percent in floating point performance. That result is based on tests run on SPECcpu2006 benchmarks.

In addition, Intel is preparing to release its own 45-nanometer family of processors, called "Penryn," by later this year.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International