Advanced Micro Devices said Thursday it is working with industry partners to standardize the so-called “Torrenza innovation socket”, which is designed to enable third-parties to drop-in their own-developed processors into servers running AMD Opteron central processing units. The company indicated that it was working with major server makers on the standard.

“Together, we recognize that the impact of Torrenza can be far-reaching across the industry in reducing complexity for customers while increasing the pace of innovation both in silicon and platforms. Datacenter managers will immediately recognize the impact of the Torrenza open environment, and benefit from the enhanced cooperation at the platform level, with new levels of platform stability, upgradeability, flexibility, and capabilities for their server infrastructure,” said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, commercial segment, AMD.

Leading server makers that develop silicon or intend to design products uniquely enabled by the Torrenza initiative, including Cray, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems plan to evaluate the Torrenza innovation socket, according to AMD.

But while unified socket for server processors and co-processors is something, which may add much more flexibility to servers, the number of server builders capable of offering competitive machines with own-designed components may reduce, as large players will be able to develop their own application-specific chips and install them only into their own servers.

Application-specific co-processors will allow AMD to address markets of very specific machines. Like the interoperability between high-end graphics chips and physics accelerators allow AMD to address the market of high-performance computers for gaming, security accelerators or ultra-fast math1 co-processors will permit AMD to install Opteron chips into pretty lucrative scientific servers.