AMD's Ninja Operation spun as a success.

AS WE REPORTED a month or so ago, AMD did not have a public stand at CeBIT.

Instead, we've established that AMD gambled another extension of its overdraft by integrating and seeding some two hundred and fifty systems to their direct and indirect partners, across more than seventy exhibition booths.

Apart from the noisy consumer focused manufacturers and vendors, these partners included corporate concentrating big shots such as IBM, Fujitsu-Siemens and Sun Microsystems. Who, probably much to Intel's horror, seem increasingly distinct and vocal in their own value added plots to run with the AMD 32/64-bit strategy.

However, as AMD also provided bare processors to a lot of other exhibitors, it's estimated that some five hundred operational systems featuring AMD 64-bit capable processors flooded the halles of the CeBIT this year.

Despite this numerous AMD'ers were pitching "it was the best CeBIT we've ever done", but we wonder whether it was solely because of this booth-less strategy, or because the merits of its product and platform is flogging itself, or perhaps because sticking with the prevailing ATX platform standard will cause some of the manufacturers less hassle, and cost less money, than any transition to Intel's LGA-775 Socket-T and BTX.

Shockingly - somehow - even AMD system badges appeared on a number of Intel systems… though we couldn't be sure whether this was a Ninja style stealth operation by a rogue AMD fundamentalist, or whether the partners themselves had decided to rebrand their exhibition systems.

An interesting whisper was that both ATI and Nvidia's NDA briefing rooms had been infiltrated. And was that an AMD based Shuttle Nvidia nForce2 system on ATi's booth?

In contrast to last year's Computex, Intel's comparative visibility - despite its typically well polished booth in Halle 2 - which we clocked AMD peering down on more than once - seemed rather lacklustre.

It sure will be interesting to see the response pulled out of Intel's deep pockets at future exhibitions.

AMD just puffing up more of its blow-up "Hammer" balloons probably won't be enough to impress. µ

* Update: Like poor Corsair Micro, we found out that AMD also had three of it exhibition systems nicked and we wonder what the hell is going on with security at the CeBIT Messe?