Bangalore: As pricing force screws up in the microprocessor section, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is marching ahead against its rivals, mainly chief opponent Intel Corp.

A day later its worldwide launch, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), yesterday uncovered its quad-core microprocessor Opteron for different servers utilized by data centres and business enterprises in the subcontinent.

Planned and made to offer advanced performance, power effectiveness, improved virtualization and up-gradation, the 65 nanometre (nm) x86 processor is heading for dropping the total cost of ownership for users.

At a preview of the new product, Michael O’Brien, AMD marketing director said, “The Opteron processor-based servers, rolled out by global OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and system integrators, has shown about 50 percent increase in energy efficiency, enhanced virtualisation performance, investment protection when upgrading from dual code using the same power (watt) to reduce IT infrastructure costs.”

For medium and large enterprises, ISVs (independent software vendors) and telecoms, the company plans to introduce the desktop version of Opteron by mid-December.

The OEMs and system builders including Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM and Sun Microsystems have commenced shipping the Opteron-powered servers to their clients all-over the world.

"We have worked with partners and customers to design a range of processing solutions with Opteron processor-based systems based on next-generation architecture," O'Brien commented.

Together with Opteron processors, the company has brought out the average CPU power (ACP) metric to measure power utilization, comprising cores, integrated memory controller and hyper-transport technology links.

Alok Ohrie, India managing director, AMD noted, “ACP enables data centre operators to estimate power budgets to size their data centres. We will also provide thermal design power specifications to platform designers in our datasheets as an industry standard.”

With data centres internationally confronting the prospective of doubling up their energy consumption by 2011, the new processors are intended to deliver enhanced performance using less power.

For the domesticated market, Ohrie stated HCL and Wipro have decided to use Opteron processors in their next-generation servers and hard-sell the product to upgrade the subsisting servers of their project customers’ crosswise verticals such as banking and financial services, telecoms, data centres, research labs and public utility service providers.