Opteron's star rises

AMD Opteron processor embraced by several vendors

Several companies are starting to use AMD’s Opteron, raising the processor’s profile. Last week Egenera announced it would use Opteron in its BladeFrame servers, Microsoft said it would use Opteron-based servers in its technology centers worldwide, and Sun said it would put Opterons into its Sun Grid Compute Utility and would upgrade its V20z and V40z servers with the popular chipset.

Egenera makes what it calls “stateless” blades - the server itself has no disk drives, only a processor and memory. The company has until now relied on Intel Xeon processors for those blades. It will roll out two- and four-way Opteron-based blades for the BladeFrame that will run 32- and 64-bit applications. The Opteron-based BladeFrame will be available in the next 30 days, the company says. Pricing has not been released.

Egenera claims its customers will be able to intermix Xeon, Opteron and Itanium BladeFrames in their environments.

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Several companies are starting to use AMD’s Opteron, raising the processor’s profile. Last week Egenera announced it would use Opteron in its BladeFrame servers, Microsoft said it would use Opteron-based servers in its technology centers worldwide, and Sun said it would put Opterons into its Sun Grid Compute Utility and would upgrade its V20z and V40z servers with the popular chipset.

Egenera makes what it calls “stateless” blades - the server itself has no disk drives, only a processor and memory. The company has until now relied on Intel Xeon processors for those blades. It will roll out two- and four-way Opteron-based blades for the BladeFrame that will run 32- and 64-bit applications. The Opteron-based BladeFrame will be available in the next 30 days, the company says. Pricing has not been released.

Egenera claims its customers will be able to intermix Xeon, Opteron and Itanium BladeFrames in their environments.

Sun also announced it would use Opteron-based servers in its Sun Grid Compute Utility, a project in which customers can buy unused compute cycles and storage from Sun. The compute utility is fashioned after Sun’s N1 grid engine and its N2000 Nauticus Content Switch - it is intended to let users buy compute time, processing power and storage capacity from Sun for as little as $1 per hour.

The Sun Grid Compute Utility will consist of thousands of dual-processor Opteron servers running Solaris and connected to Sun’s midrange StorEdge 6920 storage array. The servers will be interconnected with InfiniBand and connect to a network via Gigabit Ethernet.

Microsoft will adopt Opteron for use in its technology centers. The company will install HP Proliant DL145 and DL585 servers.

At LinuxWorld this week, AMD is expected to announce details of its dual-core processors. The company demonstrated a dual-core Sun server earlier this year.

Mercury Research estimates that AMD has captured 16.6% of the microprocessor market. In x86-based servers, IDC estimates that AMD has an 8% market share.

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