AMD today announced the immediate availability of the new Six-Core AMD Opteron EE processor at 40W ACP.

AMD said the new chip is aimed at companies that use servers for tasks like cloud computing, and are looking to cut power and costs related to things like air conditioning.

The company claims that the new CPU delivers up to 31 percent higher performance-per-watt over standard Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.

AMD's new CPU are fully-featured and available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P features for advanced virtualization and power savings capability as standard power versions.

This 40W ACP processor is currently being integrated in custom solutions programs and will be available from system builders for cloud and Web 2.0 customers where density and low power are key considerations.

"It's important for our industry to look at how technology is being used and where customers have emerging needs," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Division. "The AMD Opteron EE processor enables OEMs to deliver energy-sipping servers that don?t compromise on power management, virtualization or performance features. It is specifically designed to help address the challenges that are generating a great deal of discussion these days - building and running very dense data centers for Web services, while doing more with less."

The new chip is part of AMD's six-core Opteron family of processors. Much larger competitor Intel also has low-power chips, but its most advanced chips have four cores.