AMD today won a round of its ongoing chip marketing battle with Intel by pumping out a new fleet of speedier dual-core Opteron chips. Intel did its best to counter the move with a couple of variations to its single-core Xeon line but obviously fell short of its rival.

Customers can start buying 2.4GHz versions of the Opteron 280 and 880 chips. That's a boost from AMD's 2.2GHz mainstream Opteron parts and puts the rest of the line on par with an existing premium 2.4GHz chip used by Sun Microsystems. The Opteron 180 chip for single processor servers and workstations will ship at 2.4GHz as well within 30 days.

HP, IBM and Sun are all expected to bring the faster Opterons to their servers in short order.

The Model 880 chip is priced at $2,649 for volume purchases, while the Model 280 will cost $1,299 and the Model 180 will cost $799.

In a statement, AMD noted that it's still waiting for Intel to compete in a dual-core chip challenge. We hope there aren't too many folks at AMD dedicated to this quixotic quest. ®

Related stories

• Fujitsu breaks from Intel-only camp, embraces Opteron (18 October 2005)
• Sun lines Opteron kit up for grid and HP users (5 October 2005)
• AMD quietly unveils ML-42 mobile CPU (4 October 2005)
• Dell's Anti-Solaris site no longer on Solaris (3 October 2005)
• IBM gives blades 4Gbit/s zip (29 September 2005)
• IBM gussies up low-end server for SMB dance (27 September 2005)
• Dell turns to Sun in battle against, er, Sun (27 September 2005)
• Intel and Dell update server gear with promises and rhetoric bump (26 September 2005)
• DDR 2 demand 'disappointing' - analyst (23 September 2005)
• Sun puts a plus on UltraSPARC servers (23 September 2005)
• Exclusive Sun's Niagara: speeds and feeds emerge (9 September 2005)
• AMD loses 64-bit CTO (8 September 2005)
• Fujitsu turns green over Opteron workstation (30 August 2005)