After 18 months of secret development and the biting of many corporate tongues at Intel Developer Forum last week, Hewlett-Packard Co has finally
announced its will deliver variants of its ProLiant X86 processors that use Advanced Micro Devices’ 64-bit Opteron processors.
Like rivals IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems, HP is trying to leverage the Opteron where it can do the most good while not upsetting the whole server
applecart.
It is hard to say whether or not HP’s support for Opteron is a watershed event for AMD because we will only know in hindsight after the tier one
server vendors ramp up sales and customers gain experience with Opteron machines.
Intel Corp is not going to take the threat of the Opteron standing still, as the launch of the 64-bit extended Xeon DP and MP processors last week
demonstrates.
What can honestly predicted at this early stage of the Opteron game is that the increasingly enthusiastic adoption of Opterons by IBM, Sun, and now HP
is going to cause a feedback loop that – unless something goes radically wrong with the design or the manufacturing of these processors – will help
them get established in the marketplace as a credible and reasonable alternative to Intel’s Xeon processors.
Link: cbronline.com
