AMD Opteron is in the real world

ONE THING YOU can always guarantee is a good soundbite from Jerry Sanders. While waiting around for the Opteron launch our very own Mike Magee was charging around finding out all he could before the big kick-off. And, of course, Jerry provided the best entertainment of the lot.

In the best INQUIRER tradition, one of our people in New York managed to overhear a little a quote and passed it on to Mike. Jerry, on top form, managed a single sentence that took in the whole industry, "tomorrow AMD will change the world and I'm not Steve Jobs, so we're going to change the real world."

Today things are looking good on the ground too. There are scores of companies supporting the Opteron at both 32- and 64bit levels. Most noticeable was IBM with its offers of managed clusters of Opteron servers running 64bit Linux with the possibility of a 64bit version of DB2 on them.

Microsoft has a big presence, as befits the world's largest software company, but the announcement that we're all waiting for has yet to be made.

Amongst the other contenders for attention are:
Adaptec; Arima; ATI; Computer Associates with its Ingres database; Cadence; Cray doing its Lawrence Livermore bit; LSI logic; Mandrake; Mentor Graphics; MSI - announcing motherboard support; NatSemi going the whole hog on Ethernet; Nvidia; Silicon Image offering SATA solutions; Sun -- what a surprise; SuSE; Trident; and United Linux.

A big gathering to be sure and that's just the headlining firms. More reports from our very own Mike Magee as they happen. µ