It certainly took a while but AMD has now finally introduced some higher-end Opteron CPUs, the SE series. The new releases include four quad-cores aimed made specially for 4-socket and 8-socket x86 servers and clocked at 2.4 and 2.5 GHz.

"Today, the performance benefits of the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processor built on AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology can help IT managers improve application performance and scalability of memory and data intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost," said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. "This is a significant benefit for customers looking to consolidate their datacenter or those interested in moving from proprietary hardware to x86 servers for mission critical software, such as database applications."

Set to soon be included in servers made by Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM, the new CPUs are the Opteron 2358 SE (2.4 GHz), 2360 SE (2.5 GHz), 8358 SE (2.4 GHz) and 8360 SE (2.5 GHz). The price tags (in 1000-unit tray quantities) set for the SE Opterons are $1,165 (2360), $873 (2358), $2,149 (8360) and $1,865 (8358).