Struggling chip vendor fights back with all-new quad-core Opteron processor to tackle the lucrative server market.

Chip vendor AMD has had a struggle on its hands in 2007 but it has come out fighting for the remainder of the year with the release of its much anticipated quad-core x86 Opteron processor.

AMD is claiming big results on the industry-standard SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks however those results have not appeared on the SPEC website as of time of publishing. AMD is claiming 50% increase in integer and floating-point performance compared to a dual-core Opteron whilst improving energy efficiency.

“Today marks one of the great milestones in microprocessor achievement as AMD again raises expectations for industry-standard computing,” said Hector Ruiz, chairman and chief executive officer, AMD.  “We’ve worked closely with our customers and partners to design a new generation of processing solutions embodied by today’s Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor – a four-way winner in performance, energy efficiency, virtualisation and investment protection.  Early customer response has been extremely positive.”

The company expects servers to start shipping with the new chips this month and also announced that some of the tricks implemented here will see light of day on the desktop platform in the form on the Phenom processor in December.

In addition to the announcement, AMD also announced a new marketing tool it’s calling Average CPU Power (ACP), a new metric designed to be able to help datacenter integrators work out the typical power consumption of a server using these new chips.

The new quad-core Opterons are said to be in the 55W and 75W ACP range.

One of the major features being spruiked about the new chips is the multi-way power efficiency design that includes AMD CoolCore Technology, Independent Dynamic Core Technology (IDCT) and Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM).

CoolCore allows the processor to turn off unused parts so they don’t consumer energy while IDCT, which is an add-on to AMD’s PowerNow! Technology, allows each core to vary its clock speed depending on the workload each core faces.

DDPM provides two sets of power sources, one for the CPU cores and one for the memory controller, allowing them to operate independently again depending on usage.

“Microsoft and AMD are working together to drive innovation, performance and energy efficiency across the datacenters and development environments,” said Bill Laing, general manager of Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp. “With 64-bit multi-core technology, Direct Connect Architecture and built-in virtualization, AMD Opteron processors continue to provide Microsoft Windows customers with an innovative platform. Looking ahead, we believe Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 running with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors will provide a compelling development and deployment platform to drive customers’ dynamic IT environments.”

The new quad-core chips maintain socket and thermal-envelope compatibility with previous second-generation Opteron processors.

Another new feature aims to improve the speed of virtualisation performance and it’s called Rapid Virtualisation Indexing, a technique that reduces the memory and CPU overhead of using virtualisation software to maintain greater data security.

The company has not released any pricing information at the time of its announcement.