AMD launched two new server processors, a 12-core and a 16-core Opteron chip codenamed Warsaw, on Wednesday.

The processors, built using AMD's 32-nanometer process technology, use the chipmaker's Piledriver core and are aimed at enterprise data centers.

They are also compatible with the company's Open 3.0 Open Compute server platform, designed using open source hardware specs published by the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led open source hardware and data center design initiative.

Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate VP and general manager of AMD's server business, said modern workloads were increasingly limited by memory capacity and I/O bandwidth because of virtualization. The new Opteron chips “are server CPUs optimized to deliver improved performance per watt for virtualized private cloud deployments with less power at lower cost points,” he said.

Base frequency of the 16-core chip, Opteron 6370P, is 2.0 GHz, which goes up to 2.5 GHz with AMD's Turbo Core technology. It needs 99W of power at full speed.

The 12-core version has similar power requirements while delivering base frequency of 2.3GHz and 2.8 GHz with Turbo Core.

Both chips are available through system integrators Penguin and Avnet. It has been qualified for servers by Sugon and Supermicro, starting at US$377 and $598, respectively.

The roll-out of new chips comes one day after AMD announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2013. The quarter was a second consecutive profitable one for the company, which reported losses for the year's first two quarters.

AMD made $89m in profit on $1.59bn in sales in the fourth quarter. Its full-year revenue was down from $5.42bn in 2012 to $5.30bn last year. The company reported an $83m loss for the full year.