AMD to position Opteron against IBM, Dell offerings

TAIWANESE OEMS have showed the INQUIRER exactly how AMD will position the Opteron, when the family of server microprocessors is launched on the 22nd of April next.

AMD - naturally - is positioning the Opteron as having the ability to deliver 32-bit and 64-bit high performance computing. It's like the Alpha story all over again. But later in the game, so to speak.

The firm will say the Opteron will deliver application performance and will stress its scaleability features.

AMD wants to position its X86-64 Opterons in a different class to Xeons and the existing, Barton core, Athlons.

For example, AMD will position the AMD Opteron against the IBM xSeries 305, 330, 335, 345 and 360 and also against Dell PowerEdge machines 1650, 2650s, 6650s, 7150s and 8450s.

It will claim that the AMD Opteron number not only represents relative performance against Xeons, from Intel, but IBM CPUs, as well.

How this will work is that AMD Opteron 800 series will be eight way machines, the 200 series will be two way, numbered 240 to 246, while the single 100 series Opterons will be positioned with 144 and 146 models, it has emerged.

AMD will use numbers such as the 842 (1.6GHz) with the first number, eight, representing scaleability, the second number four represent relative performance against other Opterons, and the third digit showing where the chips are in the overall scheme. µ

* MEANWHILE, AMD Zone has some information about Opteron system pricing, which you can find here.