AMD Opteron 6200 CPUs Are the Best Server Processors, Linley Group Claims

Consumers may have been miffed by Bulldozer's failure to live up to its hype, but the people on the server market have a much higher opinion of the CPUs, apparently.

It appears that the “Bulldozer” architecture is definitely not unloved on the server market, even if its consumer-oriented incarnations have been having a hard time, even with the performance hotfix.

It so happens that The Linley Group recently hold the first session of their annual Analysts' Choice Awards.

After looking at products released between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011, they have reached the conclusion that the AMD Opteron 6200 line is the best there is on the server front.

“The AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor rose to the top of our list of nominees due to its leading performance for high-volume, dual-socket servers,” said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group.

“Reported SPEC_rate2006 baseline scores show the AMD Opteron processor Model 6282 SE delivers about 20 percent greater integer performance and nearly 40 percent greater floating-point performance than comparable processors from the competition and costs about 40 percent less.”

It bears noting that the Opteron 6200 also got recognized by Infoworld recently, during the Technology of the Year event (the chip was part of the Dell PowerEdge R715).

Needless to say, the Sunnyvale, California-based company was every bit as pleased with the news as one can guess.

“We are honored to receive this prestigious award from The Linley Group,” said Pat Patla, corporate vice president for AMD's Server Business.

“Since we launched the new AMD Opteron processor a little more than 2 months ago, the industry has rallied around the combination of innovation and price-performance advantage AMD is delivering to Cloud, HPC and enterprise customers. It is clear the new AMD Opteron processor with our 'Bulldozer' technology is a winner.”