Today, AMD announced the release of three new dual-core Opterons running at 2.6GHz. The Opteron 185, 285, and 885 support one-way, two-way, and eight-way systems, respectively. 285 and 885 processors are available now, with the 185 expected to ship within 30 days.

The new series - 185 (for one-way systems), 285 (up to two-way) and 885 (up to eight-way) - are not revolutionary, but demonstrate that AMD is still able to scale its Opteron platform. The clock speed increases from 2.4 GHz in the previous flagship series x80 to 2.6 GHz in the x85 series. The company claims that 285-based 2-processor servers will see a 15% performance increase over a 280 system when running under Windows; 885-based 4-processor servers will see a 4% gain over 880-systems in a Linux environment.

However, it isn't so much the Opteron's performance that AMD is highlighting these days. Whenever there is a chance, AMD pushes its power consumption advantage over Intel - which has reached a dramatic level in the dual-core arena. While all three new Opterons remain in the 95 watt power envelope, Intel's dual-core Xeon DP with 2.8 GHz Paxville core is listed with a thermal design power (TDP) of 135 watts. According to spec sheets posted on Intel's website, the Xeon MP 7000 series has a TDP of 165 watts, which may be caused by the 4 MB L2 cache of the higher end models of the family. The Opteron comes with just 1 MB of cache per core, but 40% less power consumption may sound very.