Although AMD has a lot of ground to recover in the high-end and high-performance consumer market, the company still holds a strong position in the energy-efficient processor market. To be more exact, its Opterons account for a high number of server systems, as they provide the necessary performance with a minimum of energy requirements. Recently, AMD has updated its quad-core Opteron server processors with four new models.

With this update, AMD has raised the performance level of its quad-core Opterons, thus allowing its users to upgrade to better products. These new quad-core processors are now available for purchase and can be acquired with frequency levels that range from 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz. The models are dubbed Opteron 2360 SE, 8360 SE, 2358 SE and 8358 SE, with the first to be featured at 2.5GHz and the last two at 2.4GHz.

With these four new models, AMD's Opteron lineup increases the number of high-performance models included, and also raises the frequency bar. One of their biggest features is also showcased in their names, with the SE tag: this means that the chips are "frequency optimized" and are designed for applications that require performance over power consumption.

If the 2360 SE and 2358 SE models are meant for business servers that integrate one or two processors, the other two models have been especially built for systems with four or more processors. The processors are priced at $1,165, $873, $2,149, and $1,865 for the 2360 SE, 2358 SE, 8360 SE and 8358 SE, respectively, in 1000-unit quantities.

According to AMD, these chips are now available in business servers from partners like HP, Dell, IBM and Sun. As mentioned above, AMD is currently trying to improve its offer with the release of new processors, aimed at providing more performance to servers.