Sales of AMD Opteron microprocessor – the world’s first and yet the only server chip that can run 32-bit and 64-bit code – for the first quarter of this year beat the aggregated supplies of the chip during the whole 2003, says a report.

A report over InformationWeek web-site cites analyst Dean McCarron for Mercury Research who claims that AMD supplied about 70 000 of AMD Opteron microprocessors in the first quarter this year. By contrast, the Sunnyvale, California-based microprocessor maker supplied about 65 000 of its server microprocessors in 2003. According to some other estimates, AMD only sold 40 000 of AMD Opteron products last year.

AMD Opteron processors are designed to serve variety of servers and workstations, including mission-critical multi-processor enterprise servers as well as cost-effective dual-processor web-servers. The processors incorporate 1MB of L2 cache, 128KB of L1 cache as well as a number of Hyper-Transport links for connecting to another CPU as well as to Hyper-Transport tunnels. All Opteron processors integrate dual-channel DDR SDRAM memory controller that can address up to 1TB of memory. The success of the chips is conditioned by the ability to run 32-bit and 64-bit code, something that is not available from Intel Corp.’s Itanium 2 and Xeon microprocessors.

In the course of the last twelve months loads of the world’s most-known server and workstation makers, including IBM, Sun, HP and Fujitsu-Siemens, adopted AMD Opteron central processing units.

After the market leader Intel Corporation earlier this year adopted technology fully-similar with AMD64 that powers the Opteron and Athlon 64 chips customers and vendors gained additional confidence in products from AMD and that could catalyze the success of the Opteron.