IBM Unveils Three Rack Servers Powered By AMD

IBM on Wednesday introduced three rack servers built for companies running memory intensive applications and powered by Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core Opteron processor.

The System x3455 is a two-socket system with up to 48 GB of memory, making it suitable for scientific, technical and financial applications, IBM said. Pricing starts at $1,809.

The x3655 model, also a two-socket system, can accommodate up to 64 GB of memory and starts at $2,499. The system is built for database, virtualization, and Web serving applications, IBM said.

Finally, the x3755 can scale up to four sockets and provides up to 128 GB of memory for scaling up computing power as a company increases the size of its database, virtualization environments, and collaboration applications.

The x3755 is available in a three-socket configuration that IBM claims performs better than some of its rivals' four-socket systems. Overall, the x3755 delivers 15% improved performance than older comparable systems from IBM, the company said. Pricing starts at $3,407.

"The new System x3755 allows clients to grow the system along with their business, affordably scaling from the standard two socket system to three and four socket configurations," James Northington, VP of System x, said in a statement.

AMD started volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processor, formerly codenamed Barcelona, in April. Before then, the company was forced to limit shipments because of a technical glitch that delayed broad availability.

The new processors have placed AMD on par with Intel's quad-core Xeon products for now. The delay in shipping Barcelona in volume had worried Wall Street analysts. Besides IBM, Hewlett-Packard is also shipping quad-core Opteron servers in its ProLiant G5 line.