Opteron server sales jump by 400 per cent

MARKET RESEARCH firm IDC said that revenues in the worldwide server market grew by 5.5 per cent in the third quarter of this year, valued at $11.5 billion.

But the bright spot is for AMD. According to IDC figures, sales of Opteron chips soared by over 400 per cent in a year*. IDC thinks that Opteron is selling into corporate, government and industrial market segments, while Intel's EM64T ships "overwhelmingly" with Windows and is in existing 32-bit environments. EM64T in Xeons accounted for 60,000 machines shipped.

IDC said that 60 per cent of AMD Opterons were tied to Linux server deployments.

Further, IDC offers little succour for Intel's Itanium microprocessor. The market for RISC based servers has suffered because of the growth of X86 based machines, with revenues exceeding RISC servers for the third consecutive quarter. Intel is positioning its Itanium chips against RISC based machines, now.

IDC did not give a unit figure for the units of systems that shipped using AMD's Opteron microprocessor.

Volume servers surged by 18.2 per cent, and that will benefit Taiwanese manufacturers. Earlier this month, the Taiwanese Market Intelligence Center reported a similar surge in servers originating from the island.

By operating system, Linux grew by 42.6 per cent with unit shipments up by nearly a third. IDC said this is the ninth consecutive quarter of double digit growth.

Windows servers grew by 13.3 per cent, with units up 19.1% quarter on quarter, year on year. Revenue for Windows servers amounted to $3.9 billion.

Unix servers showed a 2.3% revenue decline quarter on quarter, year on year, amounting to $4 billion. Unix servers showed 8.3 per cent growth.

By manufacturer, IBM had 31.7 per cent share but HP was number one in shipments, accounting for 26.8% share. Dell and Sun were in joint third place, but the Great Satan of Hardware had 1.41 per cent year on year revenue growth, while Sun grew by a miserable 0.1 per cent, said IDC. µ

* CORRECTION not quarter on quarter as we originally wrote. However, IDC has no figures on shipments.

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