Opteron Gets a Foothold
When AMD launched the Opteron one year ago it was hailed as a significant technological innovation with some major market hurdles to overcome. Since then the Opteron has found its way most of the tier-one OEM portfolios and helped AMD post two consecutive quarters of profit. Now AMD hopes it can build on the chips initial success and open up a pathway to fast, low-power four-way workstations.
"In the next six months you will see advanced four-way products, lower power chips, and improvements from an architectural standpoint," says Benjamin Williams, director of Server/Workstation Business Segments at AMD. Williams says the company will also be moving to a 90nm process in the third quarter of 2004, which should also increase performance and clock rates. The company has also announced plans to build a dual-core Opteron for servers in 2005, but is has not indicated if these chips would also go into workstations.
In Opteron's short history, it has gained the backing of a number of powerful companies. Leading OEMs including Fujitsu-Siemens Computer, HP, IBM and Sun-are currently shipping AMD Opteron processor-based systems. More than 250 OS and ISV partners support AMD64 technology including Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat, Sun, SUSE LINUX and VMware.
This kind of industry support has driven sales. According to IDC research, Opteron shipments have doubled each quarter since the product was launched. Still, the overall market share has been relatevly small compared to Intel. With just 35,000 Opteron servers shipping in 2003, Opteron is a small slice of the 3.26 million-unit IA-32 server market. Its share of the workstation market is also relatively small, but the Opteron's impact goes beyond the number of chips that are sold.
"AMD has helped change the industry landscape by establishing the AMD64 technology as the first platform to bring 64-bit computing to the x86 architecture. OEMs who have added AMD Opteron processor-based servers to their portfolios have expanded their addressable market for the x86 marketplace," according to Vernon Turner, group vice president of Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC. "The AMD Opteron processor gives enterprise customers flexibility and scalability with the investment protection of an industry-standard server platform."
Opteron's ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit code provides customers with a pain-free upgrade path to 64-bit computing. AMD has also brought the same technology to the desktop with its Athlon64 processor. Because of the Opteron's and Athlon 64's success, Intel was forced to develop 64-bit extensions for its own 32-bit chips. Xeons and Pentium 4s capable of running 64-bit applications could arrive later this year, but Williams thinks AMD can still compete with Intel.
RSS feed
