'AMD Inside' Is Heard More Often
June 14, 2004
"................The company shipped around 70,000 Opterons in the first quarter of this year, and volumes are expected to increase significantly as the year goes on, analyst McCarron says. It's only in the past couple of months that major computer makers, which account for 70% of all x86-based servers sold, began to offer Opteron systems in earnest to the open market.
"We're seeing significant opportunities in the marketplace, and, frankly, we can hardly build the systems fast enough," says Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun. Opteron-based servers are now a strategic focus at Sun, he says.
Still, those numbers are tiny compared with the volume server market that's dominated by Intel's Xeon processor, McCarron says. Intel shipped about 6 million Xeons last year and 1.7 million in the first quarter of this year.
Opteron represents new opportunities for AMD on several fronts, McCarron says. Although AMD achieved its largest share of the microprocessor market in early 2001, when it was inside about 22% of all PCs, those numbers came from consumer PCs using its Athlon processor. Today, AMD controls about 15% of the microprocessor market and only 5% of the server processor market. But its growing success in the enterprise is expected to provide it with opportunities to gain greater access to the business desktop and laptop markets as well, he says............"While unit volumes [of Opteron] are not large as yet, it's been only a year in a market that is notoriously slow for adopting new products," McCarron says. "Change is not a thing that's done trivially" by enterprise systems makers.
Some customers are interested in making a change. VeriSign Inc., a provider of technology infrastructure and information-security services, has a critical need for 64-bit computing because "what we care about is how many operations per second we can get in a given class" of computer, says Aristotle Balogh, senior VP of operations and infrastructure. VeriSign also works with large data sets that would benefit from 64-bit computing.
VeriSign has prototyped every Itanium chip to be released by Intel and uses some Itanium-based servers. "They're just incredibly expensive. There's just no way around it," Balogh says. "But when we got ahold of some Opteron boxes about a year ago, frankly, we were blown away by the absolute price-performance improvement."
informationweek.com
EDIT: This is a 3 page article telling the story to the masses |
