AMD has a server chip for the cheap seats: the ‘desktop-like’ Opteron 3200
So, AMD’s 2012 rampage continues. Having outed a full stack of Radeon HD 7000-series graphics cards on the consumer side of things, it’s now ready release the next in its line of Opteron enterprise server chips. Like the 4200 and 6200 series before it, the Opteron 3200 is based on the Bulldozer architecture. It comes in four or eight-core configurations, with 45W to 65W power consumption, plus a 2.7GHz base frequency that gets a 1GHz adrenalin kick in Turbo Core mode (which prioritizes half the cores and shuts down the other half). However, the 3200 series is designed to offer cloud and web hosting server functionality in a cheaper, “desktop-like infrastructure”, which means these processors squeeze into a regular AM3+ socket and undercut comparable Xeons by up to $90. Can we expect server builders like SeaMicro to switch to these processors instead of Intel? Oh, you can count on it.
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