Joe, Re: "Microsoft announced that it would ship an Opteron-compliant release of the 64-bit Datacenter version of Window .Net Server, but the company has not committed to a date."
Assuming this statement is correct, then that would explain why there is no x86-64 support in the Windows .NET server that has thus far been released into RC1. The Datacenter version is always the last to be released. I expect it towards the middle of next year. It's also the most expensive version of Windows that one can license. If AMD doesn't have any more support than from Datacenter, then x86-64 support will be regulated to a very small niche of users. What's most important is the client release, which probably won't happen until Longhorn in 2004. However, even a mainstream .NET server release would bring the capability to smaller servers, which would be AMD's biggest opportunity. Yet if Datacenter is all that Microsoft has committed to, then I doubt we'll see a server edition for quite some time.
Re: IBM, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, BEA, J.D. Edwards, Oracle, etc
and: "The more I hear the "customer-driven" answer, the more I realize that part of AMD's problem is the old chicken-and-egg conundrum. It's hard for customers to get excited about Opteron without first seeing some systems and software that run on it. But it's hard for systems and software vendors to get excited about Opteron without first seeing customer interest. This can't be a good situation for AMD."
The above quote seems to sum it up. None of the major players will be interested in Opteron until AMD can demonstrate an advantage, and that's not likely to happen before they have real systems to show off. Until they can produce a production system with performance far outreaching the Intel equivalent, I don't see them making a reputation for themselves. And without that, OEMs are likely to have nothing more to show than "interest" to rouse the analysts.
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