AMD ups server ante
Chip vendor increases market share prediction by 10 per cent
AMD has upped it targets in terms of server market share this year, according to marketing director at the chip vendor Marty Seyer. He said that the firm has revised its target and wants to leave 2006 with 30 per cent server market share instead of the 20 per cent it had predicted.
Speaking to analysts, Seyer said that there were currently 50 platforms supporting Opterons. He said AMD grew from 16 per cent in the fourth quarter 2005 to 22 per cent in Q1 2006.
He said Intel was reacting to what he claimed was AMD's leadership, but he said Intel was comparing future products to its current shipping products. Seyer also claimed that if Opterons [AMDs chips] are compared to [Intel’s] future Woodcrests, AMD will continue to have the leadership crown for performance per watt.
"We rate our products at the maximum wattage, while the competition rates its at something less than that," he claimed.
He claimed AMD will become the default architecture for blades because of the power consumption. At Hewlett-Packard, 75 per cent of blade designs use AMD technology, he said.
He said AMD intends to release future technology in a timely manner, under the code words; Torrenza, Trinity, and Raiden. Torrenza will allow the licensing of hypertransport and other elements.
AMD will open the socket and the architecture to third parties. Accelerator cards can be linked to AMD architecture tightly coupled to core silicon, he said. A two-socket design could use one socket for microprocessing, and the other for security, or using a media accelerator in step with a CPU, or an XML server, or a gaming co-processor. Intel won't open up its architecture, with broad acceptance for different sectors of the market. Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and Cray are backing this plan, he said.
Trinity is a set of security features that has an integrated approach to servers and to clients, including virtualisation. The client side will be an open standard with an open management partition on both server and client side, extensible by third parties.
Raiden is a concept to re-invent the client. “IT departments have nightmares about image management and need to reduce the costs. The initiative is aimed at "re-inventing the commercial client," he said. Further details were unavailable.
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