AMD released its Shanghai 45nm quad-core Opteron CPUs today. The CPUs promise up to a 35% decrease in power consumption at idle and 35% more performance than previous Opteron CPUs. The CPUs feature AMD-Virtualization technology to deliver faster world switch time and enhance virtual machine efficiency.

L2 cache size has increased to 6MB in the new processors and support for DDR2-800 RAM is offered. AMD says that coming enhancements to the AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport 3.0 will provide up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communications. The release is set for Q2 2009. The new Opteron's are available at 75-watt ACP running from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz and are available now.

“Dell and AMD have a shared commitment to providing businesses with a full line-up of powerful products that simplify and lower the cost of managing IT environments,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell’s Business Product Group. “Our PowerEdge servers are specifically designed to take advantage of the virtualization features AMD has built into its chips. That close collaboration has paid off with record breaking virtualization performance for all 2 and 4 socket rack and blade PowerEdge servers.”

Via AMD