HP and AMD Opteron: bed fellows at last

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has adopted Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's) Opteron proces­sor for its vol­ume servers although HP has long used Intel's Xeon proces­sor exclu­sively. What does this mean for the server mar­ket (plus, what does it mean for aver­age Joes who could really do with 64-bit power!)

After some spec­u­la­tions last year, Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently announced that it has finally adopted Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's) Opteron proces­sor for its vol­ume servers although HP has long used Intel's Xeon proces­sor exclu­sively. What does this mean for the server mar­ket (plus, what it means for users who wish to try out Win­dows XP 64-bit beta..)

For­tune has an inter­est­ing view­point: Why AMD is in the chips.

It's anyone's guess that a mar­ket oppor­tu­nity exists in the space between IA-32 proces­sors and Ita­nium server tech­nol­ogy. Tech­no­log­i­cally, AMD's Opteron proces­sor neatly fits this space. How­ever, AMD was chal­lenged to find part­ners to bring its tech­nol­ogy to the broad Win­dows and Linux server mar­kets. HP's adop­tion of AMD's 64-bit Opteron chip meets this chal­lenge. Although, it is hard not to notice that HP hasn't really said that it'll be replac­ing Intel's Ita­nium 64-bit proces­sor (of which it reigns supreme as a lead­ing pro­po­nent), which car­ries a higher price tag along with increased com­put­ing power.

HP is not the first major ven­dor part­ner for AMD: IBM has already adopted Opteron in its high-performance sys­tems, and Sun Microsys­tems has adopted Opteron in its vol­ume server line. How­ever, Gart­ner believes that HP will be the first ven­dor to com­mit to deliv­er­ing Opteron-based servers that run on both Win­dows and Linux.

HP's embrace of Opteron will do one or more of the following:

• Forc­ing IBM to broaden its com­mit­ment to Opteron
• Forc­ing Dell to take another look at this technology
• Spurring Intel to play its hand regard­ing its rumored "Yamhill" tech­nol­ogy, which like Opteron, is allegedly a 32-bit proces­sor with 64-bit extensions
• Cre­at­ing con­fu­sion around the mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties for Itanium

It may be time for orga­ni­za­tions to eval­u­ate poten­tial price/performance advan­tages of Opteron-based servers for ter­mi­nal serv­ing, Web serv­ing, high-performance com­puter clus­ters and main­stream 32-bit appli­ca­tions. This eval­u­a­tion should include run­ning Opteron with the 32-bit ver­sion of Win­dows Server and the forth­com­ing 64-bit ver­sion of Win­dows Server.

If you have a tin­kle of adven­ture in you, check out what Microsoft has made avail­able: a test Win­dows XP for peo­ple with 64-bit CPUs!