AMD announced on Monday three new models in the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor family that lead the industry in x86 performance and performance-per-watt capabilities. The processors come in three models: the 885 for systems with up to eight processors, the 285 for systems with one or two processors, and the 185 for systems with one processor. The 885 and 285 are available now, while the 185 will be released in about a month, the company said.

The processors are priced at $2,149 for the 885 and $1,051 for the 285, both for 1,000-unit quantities. Pricing for the 185 was not released.

The dual-core chips give extra performance without greatly increasing power consumption or cooling requirements compared to AMD's single-core processors, according to the company.

They use AMD's PowerNow and Optimized Power Management technologies, which allow servers and workstations to regulate the amount of power used by the processors based on usage. The technologies can reduce power consumption by up to 75% during idle time, according to AMD.

IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems and HP plan to offer the processors in their servers and workstations, AMD said.