AMD has added five processors to the Opteron family – based on the chipmaker’s Bulldozer core – initially launched in November 2011.

Michael Detwiler, product marketing manager at AMD, said the new processors had better performance than the previous generation but consumed the same amount of power. AMD called this a “speed bump”, he said.

“We’re adding SKUs to the lineup, adding performance, while staying in the same power consumption,” he said.

AMD added two processors to the high-end Opteron 6000 line and three to the lower-end 4000 line. All new chips have been “picked up” by the company’s largest original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners: HP and Dell.

HP included the new Opteron 6200 Series chips in two of its latest ProLiant Gen8 servers, while also planning to refresh two previous-generation G7 ProLiants. Dell is refreshing seven servers in its PowerEdge family with processors from the new release.

The 6000 series of Opteron processors is for the compute world’s heavy lifting, or applications like virtualization, databases and high-performance computing (HPC).

Two famous HPC systems have employed Opteron chips from the November launch. They are the US National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project and the Jaguar supercomputer at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Oak Ridge National Labs.

The 4000-series chips catered to the “cost- and power-optimized” market, Detwiller said: small and medium-size businesses or providers of services running on cloud infrastructure. “They do provide good performance [and] good functionality but they’re also cost-optimized,” he said.

Here’s a list of the new AMD chips, their power consumption (as specified by AMD) and cost:

AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors

• AMD Opteron 6284 SE: 16-core 2.7 GHz, 140 watts TDP, US$1,265
• AMD Opteron 6278: 16-core 2.4 GHz, 115 watts TDP, US$989

AMD Opteron 4200 Series processors

• AMD Opteron 4276 HE: 8-core 2.6 GHz, 65 watts TDP, US$455
• AMD Opteron 4240: 6-core 3.4 GHz, 95 watts TDP, US$316
• AMD Opteron 4230: 6-core 2.9 GHz, 65 watts TDP, US$377