Cheap, Energy Efficient AMD Chips Hint at Desktop Supercomputing

AMD hasn't given up its fight in the CPU battle against rival Intel: It's now reaching for the next computing revolution--the cloud. A slew of new powerful but cheap AMD chips are out. They also prove desktop supercomputing is en route.

The new chips are part of the Opteron 4100 family, codenamed Lisbon, and they're pretty much chip-for-chip replacements for their predecessors, achieving the same power performance with a smaller hunger for power. It's a shift from what we're used to in a CPU...