Shanghai delivers up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle than previous AMD processors. AMD promises its new Opteron product will drive data -center efficiencies and spur virtualization performance.

In concert with its OEM and solution-provider partners, AMD is addressing the need for enterprises to focus on the bottom line while giving them the innovations they need to build for the future, according to Randy Allen, senior vice president at AMD's Computing Solutions Group.

"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," Allen said.

Addressing Memory Issues

IBM is among the first OEMs to announce Shanghai-based products, its Bladecenter LS42 and LS22.

The IBM BladeCenter LS22 is a two-socket blade server that targets financial-services firms, universities and research labs, along with oil and gas companies that run high-performance applications. IBM said clients can purchase the LS22 with a memory booster that gives it 96 percent faster memory for improved application performance.

IBM said the BladeCenter LS42 consumes up to 16 percent less power than comparable blade offerings. It also provides 20 percent faster memory, the company said, so it is well suited to run memory-intensive applications like virtualization and databases.

"Memory is something that gets impacted significantly when a business decides to aggressively virtualize systems," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "You can have all the processor performance you need, but if you don't have the memory to support the applications, then performance can get whacked pretty badly."

Big Blue's Beefy Blades

IBM said the BladeCenter LS22 and LS42 are available with solid-state drives, which are up to four times more reliable than traditional drives and use up to 87 percent less power -- saving up to 20 watts per blade.

"IBM continues to deliver the broadest portfolio of blade servers on the market with today's introduction of BladeCenter servers based on the newest quad-core AMD Opteron processors," said Alex Yost, vice president of IBM BladeCenter. "The new LS42 allows clients to grow the system along with their business, affordably scaling from a two-socket system to a four-socket configuration while delivering industry-leading power use and performance." (continued...)

1  |  2  |  Next Page >