Round Rock, Texas-based Dell has recently announced the introduction of eight new tower, blade and rack-mount PowerEdge servers, designed to take advantage of the just introduced quad-core Opteron processors, designed by AMD. The new PowerEdge servers and blades build on AMD's 45nm-based quad-core Opterons, codenamed Shanghai, are meant to deliver better virtualization performance, and to help customers reduce IT complexity and costs.

"Dell understands how to give you the most compute power for your IT dollar. So, we've designed our AMD processor-based servers and blades to be powerful and virtualization-ready, but simple and affordable," said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell's Business Product Group.

AMD's Shanghai Opteron processors are now powering Dell's two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers, including three of the PC vendor's blade servers, namely the M905, M805, M605. In addition, four of Dell's rack servers (R905, R805, 2970, SC1435) and one of its tower servers (T605) have also been featured with the new quad-core."AMD has worked hard to develop advanced virtualization capabilities as part of our new 45nm Quad-Core AMD OpteronTM processor," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation division, AMD. "We're glad that Dell has chosen to utilize our virtualization technology in new blade, rack and tower servers, leveraging unique-to-AMD features such as Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and AMD Extended Migration, to enable an extremely flexible IT environment that meets the needs of businesses of all sizes."

Some of the benefits brought by Dell's new PowerEdge server lineup include delivering improved performance, using Dell's Dual HT link designs, which are said to double the available bandwidth between two processors for what AMD estimates to be a 12 percent improvement. In addition, the new Dell server systems provide a better power efficiency, which is likely due to the 45nm process technology used in AMD's new quad-core processors.