Third-generation AMD Opteron processors are designed to optimize multi-threaded application performance, and include multiple architectural enhancements over second-generation AMD Opteron processors. To help organizations understand the performance increases possible when upgrading to third-generation processors, Dell engineers performed benchmark tests against a variety of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.Third-generation AMD Opteron processors include key architectural enhancements designed to boost performance and energy efficiency over the second-generation processors without sacrificing memory bandwidth.