Computer manufacturer Dell has just added four new Barcelona-powered offerings to its server portfolio. The new servers are part of the PowerEdge SC1435 family, built around AMD's quad-core Opteron chips in the B3 silicon stepping.

The company's new products include four different Opteron 2300 series processors to power its PowerEdge SC1435 system. The chips are alleged to work at frequencies of between 2.0 GHz and 2.3 GHz, with 512 Kb of L2 cache and 2MB of shared L3 cache pool.

The SC1435 model is a two-socket 1U server that supports up to 32GB of memory, while the storage capacity can scale up to 2TB on two SATA hard-disk drives.

"Our PowerEdge servers deliver on Dell's commitment to simplify IT by providing customers with a seamless and simple upgrade path to quad-core, making it easier and quicker for them to realize the benefits of these advanced processors," said Sally Stevens, Dell's Director of PowerEdge Servers. "Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors running on Dell PowerEdge servers delivers the right balance of performance, energy efficiency and price for customers while helping to accelerate our vision of scale-out computing in the enterprise."

Dell's decision to re-adopt AMD's Barcelona chips is a great relief for the processor manufacturer, that now can count on the two top-tier system vendors as channel partners for its products. Both Hewlett-Packard and Dell will have a significant contribution in increasing AMD's revenue in processor shipments.

However, the server vendor's experience with the quad-core Opteron was more of a nightmare, right after they got adopted. Despite the fact that Intel's Xeon family of chips were equally powerful and efficient, or at least they were on the right way, Dell decided to go with the Opteron chips. However, the sudden death of the Barcelona B2 silicon stepping left the server vendor with quite a few server designs and no available processors.