AMD announced the latest Opteron series of server processors Monday, saying it has improved performance and energy efficiency of the product family. The processors are based on the company’s latest Piledriver core architecture.

A series of hardware vendors already have systems based on the new Opteron 6300 available, with more expected to launch systems before the end of the year. AMD has also developed an open-source Roadrunner platform based on the new chips.

Roadrunner is a product AMD developed through the Open Compute Project, an open-source hardware and data center design community spearheaded by Facebook. The first spec for a Roadrunner platform optimized for financial-services companies was released in May.

There are three pieces to the new Opteron’s value proposition: performance and scalability, energy efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Evaluating its performance with Java applications, AMD found that Opteron 6300 processor provided 24% higher performance than its predecessor from the 6200 series.

The processor’s performance was “comparable” with Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips in high-performance-computing applications but cost 50% less, Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate VP and general manager of AMD’s server business, said.

The first publicly announced HPC customer deploying an Opteron-6300-based system is Indiana University. The school has ordered a supercomputer named Big Red from Cray, which will be powered by 21,000 new Opteron cores.

Performance per watt was 40% greater than the previous-generation chips. This improvement comes primarily from better scheduling optimization, Gopalakrishan said.

“Bulk of that has to do with optimizations that compliers are now able to pick up.” Compilers translate source code from one programming language to another.

Another part of the energy efficiency improvements was more flexible power management.

“You can turn off cores,” Gopalakrishan explained. “When cores are shut down, you can increase the frequency of other cores.”

While improving performance and energy efficiency, the processor has the same power and thermal requirements, the same socket and the same software certifications as the 6200 series, Gopalakrishnan said. “This is something our OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and customers like.”

Vendors that announced availability of 6300-based systems are Cray, SGI, Supermicro, AMAX, Appro, ASUS, ClusterVision, Colfax International, MEGWARE Computer, Microway, Penguin Computing, Silicon Mechanics and ZT Systems. AMD expects Dell and HP to announce theirs before the end of 2012.

The announcement comes less than one week after AMD unveiled its new non-x86 play: a 64-bit ARM processor that will also bear the “Opteron” brand. The company said it expected to have its ARM-based System-on-a-Chip cards for high-density scale-out server deployments on the market in 2014.