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Sunnyvale-based chip maker Advanced Micro Devices came to the market with a new line of Opteron chips, shortly following the release of the six-core Opteron processor codenamed “Istanbul.” The new silicon solution, John Fruehe, director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD, says, comes under the codename “Suzuka” and hits the market as a quad-core processor developed for single-socket systems.

Suzuka doesn't seem to come to the shelves as a breathtaking product, yet it is intended to fulfill the needs of the cost-effective SME market. The latest AMD Opteron 1000 Series processor, Fruehe says, has not been developed to offer scalability, but will fit applications that are cost and power aware, such as web servers, small business servers and workstations.

The new chips come at speeds of 2.5GHz (Opteron 1381), 2.7GHz (Opteron 1385) and 2.9GHz (Opteron 1389), having been developed on the same core as the company's “Shanghai” CPU, another quad-core Opteron processor. Suzuka, manufactured under the 45-nm SOI process technology, comes with x86-64 processing cores on a monolithic die and features 512 KB of L2 cache per core, coupled with a shared 6 MB L3 cache.

The new processors will use the AM3 socket and not the 1207-pin Socket F, while also offering compatibility with existing AM2+ mobos (can be easily used on motherboards that work with Budapest quad-core chips – the single socket version of Barcelona). The new solutions feature system bus speeds of 2200 MT/s (HyperTransport bus actual speed of 1100 MHz), while sporting a rated TDP of around 115 W.

According to John Fruehe, the performance increase when moving from a quad-core “Budapest” chip to the new “Suzuka” is not the most impressive part in the process; the fact that the power consumption drops significantly with the new processor is. As for the price tags the new chips come to the market with, Opteron 1381 costs US $189, Opteron 1385 goes for $229, while Opteron 1389 has been priced at $269.