By Paul Gottsegen, Vice-president, Integrated Marketing, Enterprise Servers & Storage, HP

Today, AMD is introducing their new Six-Core AMD Opteron "Istanbul" processors. For our customers, the performance gains of AMD's new chip combined with the innovations around energy efficiency, virtualization and management of our new ProLiant G6 platform will enable them to get more value from every IT dollar they spend.

We are really excited about Istanbul and you can bet that we'll be introducing new AMD-based rack, tower and blade servers in very short order. We could have just dropped the new chip in to existing servers, but that wouldn't have allowed our customers to take full advantage of the power of Istanbul. So, instead you'll see that we've innovated around Istanbul to deliver systems that lead the industry on price/performance.

The performance gains and power efficiency of these new ProLiant G6 systems can also have a significant impact on the bottom line. In fact, replacing the single-core systems with new ProLiant G6 systems, customers can see a pay-back on their investment of right around 3-months.  This is due to the combination of lower energy bills, increased computing capability of each server and fewer software licenses required to do the same amount of work.

AMD's execution was nothing short of flawless. Once again, they delivered ahead of schedule. And right around the corner you'll see a full suite of Istanbul server products from HP.