Inside HPC has nice writeup on AMD’s latest Istanbul chips that can help you decode all that confusing letter/number product naming soup:

“Large HPC clusters are often built out of the standard bin Opterons (an average rated power of 75w per socket) when AMD is used, rather than the SE as you might expect at first glance. This is because standard bin parts tend to offer both better price performance and the lower power consumption you need in anything other than moderate cluster deployments. Fruehe explains that the SE part (at 105W per socket) tends to do well in high performance scientific workstations, where aggregate power draw won’t be an issue. He does say that the lower power HE part (at 55W per socket) is seeing increased adoption in HPC, but that right now it tends to be built into systems that are more scale-out in nature (web or cloud infrastructure).” Full Story

Source/Kaynak : http://blogs.sun.com/HPC/entry/amd_intros_new_members_of