AMD has confirmed development of a low power six core CPU known as the Istanbul Opteron EE processor. The energy efficient CPU uses 40W ACP and is said to be 31% more efficient then current quad core AMD processors available on the market.

The target market for the new chip is enterprise servers and data centers where high power consumption is a major concern. In fact, for many large corporations, power issues are such a great concern that server virtualization has become a key driver of success due to the rate of physical server deployment outstripping the capacity of their data centers.

According to Patrick Patla, VP & GM of server/workstation division “The AMD Opteron EE processor enables OEMs to deliver energy-sipping servers that don’t compromise on power management, virtualization or performance features. It is specifically designed to help address the challenges that are generating a great deal of discussion these days – building and running very dense data centers for Web services, while doing more with less.”

AMD anticipates a high deployment rate of the new processor within Web 2.0 and cloud computing environments.

[Source]