A CPU maker boasting about more performance per watt than any rival in its class? You might guess it's Transmeta touting its battery-thrifty portable chips, but it's AMD's newest broadside at the blade-server and enterprise cluster markets -- low- and mid-power Opteron processors designed to cut power consumption in corporate data centers. Like all AMD64 chips, the new Opteron HE (55-watt) and Opteron EE (30-watt) offer both topnotch performance with existing 32-bit software and a seamless migration to 64-bit operating systems and applications. The 0.13-micron-process CPUs offer increased computing density while cutting operational costs, especially for relatively small and cool-running blade servers.

The Opteron HE processors run at a clock speed of 2.0GHz; the EE models at 1.4GHz. Both incorporate a 128-bit, ECC-compatible DDR memory controller, 64K apiece of Level 1 data and instruction cache, and 1MB of Level 2 cache. Models optimized for uniprocessor workstations and entry-level servers, the Opteron 140 EE and 146 HE, cost $733 apiece in 1,000-unit OEM quantities; the dual-processor-platform models 240 EE and 246 HE are priced at $851; and the 4- or 8-way Opteron 840 EE and 846 HE cost $1,514.