Chipmaker AMD last week announced low-power versions of its Opteron family of 64bit workstation and server processors. The chips are aimed at hardware with a high density of processing power, such as blade servers or blade desktop systems, and they offer the most performance per watt of energy of any processor in their class, according to AMD.

The AMD Opteron processors HE and EE, set to ship next month, are designed to operate at 55W and 30W respectively, which compares with a power consumption of up to 89W for standard Opteron processor types.

"Any enterprise concerned about power usage in their datacentre now has a low-power option that also offers industry-leading per-watt performance," said Marty Seyer, vice-president and general manager of AMD's microprocessor business unit.

The 30W Opteron models 140 EE, 240 EE and 840 EE are clocked at 1.4GHz, while the 55W models 146 HE, 246 HE and 846 HE are all clocked at 2.0GHz.

AMD said that the HE and EE models are equivalent in performance to full-power chips with the same model numbers. The chips are intended for hardware such as blade servers, or field workstations for harsh environments, AMD said.

AMD's Opteron chips, launched last year, are compatible with current 32bit PC software, but also extend the x86 architecture to support 64bit operating systems and applications. The 100, 200 and 800 series are designed for single-chip, two-way and eight-way systems, respectively.

Volume prices start at $733 (£380) for the 140 EE and 146 HE models.

The 240 EE and 246 HE are priced at $851 (£450), while the 840 EE and 846 HE are priced at $1,514 (£790).