 AMD's Opteron |
4/26/2004 |
Customers are saying that Opteron is a damn good chip at a great price, which has allowed HP and IBM to
deliver value servers, Aberdeen Group chief research officer Peter Kastner told TechNewsWorld.
Coming out of a recession, IT organizations are more value-conscious, and AMD has hit a sweet spot.
Chip challenger AMD marked the one-year anniversary of its Opteron processor this week, touting the chip's
64-bit computing capabilities and indicating it will expand its market to the four-way server datacenter
sector as well.
AMD credits Opteron's lowering of the 64-bit threshold for the success of the chip, which is 32-bit and 64-bit
compatible with x86 architecture. In addition, AMD said demand has driven top original equipment manufacturers
(OEMs), including HP, IBM, Sun and Fujitsu Siemens, to ship the processor in its first year.
However, industry analysts suggested that the chip's 64-bit computing capability is not as compelling as its
price tag. "It's a price-performance story," Gartner research vice president Martin Reynolds told
TechNewsWorld. "When you get an Opteron box, you get a lot of capability for what you pay, so it's just
cost-effective."
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