AMD today introduced four new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors to help IT managers take a new approach to "scaling up" their datacenter.

Rather than invest in traditionally large and expensive enterprise-class proprietary hardware, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors empower businesses to affordably scale up a datacenter by moving to servers that can offer enterprise-class functionality at industry-standard pricing.

Adding more cores to 4-socket and 8-socket x86 servers can allow users to gain greater levels of performance and efficiency which is necessary to handle database and virtualization applications. The new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors will be available in systems from global OEMs and solution providers including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM.

"For many customers, the concept of ?scaling up? a datacenter has meant a sizeable financial investment in new hardware to gain satisfactory performance during peak workloads," said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. "Today, the performance benefits of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processor built on AMD?s Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology can help IT managers improve application performance and scalability of memory and data intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost. This is a significant benefit for customers looking to consolidate their datacenter or those interested in moving from proprietary hardware to x86 servers for mission critical software, such as database applications."

AMD 's new series of Opterons include the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Models 2360 SE (2.5 GHz), the 2358 SE (2.4 GHz), 8360 SE (2.5 GHz), and 8358 SE (2.4 GHz).