X-bit labs: Aren’t you afraid that you are moving at a too slow pace, that you might be too late for the market and that your competitors may take over a big share of AMD platforms market by then?

Charles Liang: A good product is never late for the market. We have a solid customer base for Opteron platforms and it will be interesting to see how the demand grows.

X-bit labs: You have probably heard that AMD is suing Intel for unfair competition. Is Intel’s pressure one of the reasons Supermicro doesn’t offer that many AMD solutions?

Charles Liang: Well, we prefer to remain neutral. We are good friends with all the companies, Intel, AMD and others. We have been working closely with Intel for a long time and they trust us as a partner and vice-versa.

X-bit labs: Ok, I won’t ask any other tricky questions about the Intel-AMD relations. Supermicro is currently offering solutions mostly for Intel platforms. In this respect, could you please say a few words about solutions for Intel Itanium?

Charles Liang: Intel Itanium is a very special architecture. Some customers like it a lot, so we do have solutions for Intel Itanium, but they are not our major focus. There is some demand for Itanium these days, but it is geared for specific customers. Itanium platforms are primarily used for scientific applications and huge databases. Again, our primary focus is DP Xeon platforms which make about 90% of all the platforms we currently ship. In the future, we will certainly concentrate on multi-core solutions.

X-bit labs: Which solution is Supermicro’s current best selling product?

Charles Liang: Right now our best selling solution is a DP 1U Xeon server platform. We provide a very broad range of products for customers to choose from. Today we offer more than 200 server motherboards and about 350 server chassis models.