AMD today introduced four new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors to help IT managers take a new approach to "scaling up" their datacenter in order to address demanding enterprise-computing environments. Rather than invest in traditionally large and expensive enterprise-class proprietary hardware, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors empower businesses to affordably and easily scale up a datacenter by moving to servers that can offer enterprise-class functionality at industry-standard pricing.

Adding more cores to 4-socket and 8-socket x86 servers can allow users to gain greater levels of performance and efficiency which is necessary to handle database and virtualization applications. The new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors will be available in systems from global OEMs and solution providers including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM.
"For many customers, the concept of 'scaling up' a datacenter has meant a sizeable financial investment in new hardware to gain satisfactory performance during peak workloads," said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. "Today, the performance benefits of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processor built on AMD's Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology can help IT managers improve application performance and scalability of memory and data intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost. This is a significant benefit for customers looking to consolidate their datacenter or those interested in moving from proprietary hardware to x86 servers for mission critical software, such as database applications."

As the industry continues to rally around "scaling up" datacenters, Microsoft is at the forefront of this discussion to help ensure that mid-market and enterprise customers seeking to improve server utilization can take full advantage of 64-bit environments, such as the x86-based SMP servers based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, for complex databases including those in consolidation and virtualization environments.

"A flexible and scalable datacenter that meets the dynamic demands of doing business in a global economy is more important than ever for organizations of all sizes," said Dan Neault, general manager, SQL Server at Microsoft Corp. "As we prepare for the general availability of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, we are excited about our work with AMD to provide our mutual customers a state of the art data platform for their business critical workloads such as ERP, Web, Business Intelligence, and Data Warehousing."

Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Models 2360 SE (2.5 GHz), 2358 SE (2.4 GHz), 8360 SE (2.5 GHz), and 8358 SE (2.4 GHz) are widely available and have already set record performance benchmarks in business-relevant testing:

• The new processors achieved the highest SAP-SD two-tier score in eight-socket x86 servers, demonstrating world-class scalability for customers looking to drive more performance in demanding ERP environments.
• Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors also achieved the highest SPECfp_rate2006 scores in both two- and four-socket x86 servers, ensuring that customers can benefit from AMD's elegant processor design and unprecedented scalability. These and other benchmark results for the Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors are available at www.amd.com/seopteronperformance.