Sunnyvale (CA) - Having won one market victory with the first introduction of multicore processors for multi-processor platforms - and not wanting anyone to forget it too soon - AMD announced this morning the release of its fourth series of three new Opteron series processors, topped by the Dual-core Model 880 and followed up by the Dual-core Model 280, both of which will be available immediately.

The Opteron 880 is geared toward four- to eight-way (4P - 8P) servers and 4P workstations, while the 280 addresses the 2P server market, and the new Dual-core Model 180 - available in late October - is geared toward single-processor servers. In 1000-unit quantities, the 880 will sell for $2649, with the 280 selling for $1299 and the 180 for $799.

AMD's Opteron processor

As John Williams, AMD's director for server product planning, told Tom's Hardware Guide, the company's new dual-core price strategy is to equalize entry-level dual-core prices with top-tier single-core. With the entry of three new models, prices of existing dual-core product lines have been reduced to single-core levels. For example, AMD's top-of-the-line two-way single-core Models 252 and 254 are priced equivalently with the reduced prices of its two-way dual-core Models 265 and 270: $690 and $851, respectively. "In the customer's mind," said Williams, "that's a no-brainer... Over time, the migration to dual-core is the logical path."

In results released this morning of SPEC benchmark tests conducted two weeks ago, the new Opteron 880 promises between 5 and 9 percent greater performance than the company's previous top-of-the-line Opteron 875, and in one test, nearly 98 percent greater performance than a 3.33 GHz Intel Xeon MP. In AMD's current Opteron numbering scheme, the first digit refers to number of processors, while the remaining digits refer to relative performance levels, increasing in multiples of five.

AMD's Williams told us, "We determined that frequency was not the correct measure of performance. With architectures like Intel's NetBurst, the gigahertz that they could achieve was not the proper balance to what we could achieve with a much better system architecture at lower gigahertz." As a result, AMD opted to use model numbering to distinguish performance, although there's only three "steps" left for Opteron before the company runs out of numbers.