AMD Opteron 3200 Released

AMD, today, announced its new Opteron 3200 chip. This new chip is made for servers. However, the one interesting thing is that this chip will be sold closer to a desktop chip price point. This could open up the server market to the average person looking to have a small server in their house.

Intel, at this point, still has a pretty good hold on the server chip market. However, over the past few years, AMD has been slowly nipping at Intel's heals. AMD hopes that the new Opteron 3200 continues its uptick in the server chip market.

Opteron 3200 Specifications

AMD has designed the 3200 series to draw a low amount of power. They also say that it will not lose any performance with the lower power usage. AMD claims that the new chip offers 38% better price performance, and draws 19% less power per core when compared to Intel's Xeon chips.

The Opteron 3200 series clocks in at 2.7Ghz. It can also ramp up to 3.7Ghz when needed. The chip will support DDR3 memory up to 1866Mhz. There will be 4 and 8-core versions that will both have 8MB of L3 cache.

Quite a few hardware companies have already signed on to use the Opteron in a few of their server offerings. Dell, MSI, and Fujitsu are just a few of them.

Opteron 3200 Pricing

It will be interesting to see how the low price of the Opteron 3200 plays out for AMD. AMD says that these chips could cost as little as $25 per core. At this price, they might really be able to cut into Intel's current dominance of the server chip market.

A lot of cloud-based computing users could be the major buyer of these chips since a cloud infrastructure costs a lot of money due to the large amount of servers needed. A savings of a few dollars per chip can really add up when building a full cloud network.

Initially, AMD will offer 3 versions of this chip, with the entry-level 3250 providing four cores at 2.5GHz. The 3260 is a step up in performance with 4 cores at 2.7GHz, while the 3280 is clocked at 2.4GHz but boasts eight cores for more processing power.

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-By Dominic

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