A very interesting and logical news was reported by AMDZone web-site this week. According to the guys, AMD currently has no plans to introduce any performance ratings with their Opteron processors intended for servers and very high-end workstation. It seems that the information is very likely to be truth, as it is very hard to imagine how we can count performance ratings for server chips.

When IT managers decide which server technology to utilise, they probably evaluate performance, reliability and scalability of a solution, they do not look at MHz or GHz since there are a lot of different CPUs for servers on the market and their frequency is very different: from 700MHz to 2.80GHz of the latest Xeon DP processors. Moreover, there is another obstacle on the performance rating’s way: what should it show on the Opteron? Comparable speed to the Intel Xeon processors in one type of software? There will be another type when the Xeon will beat the Opteron and the rating will become obsolete. As said above, there are too lot of different chips on this market and it is pretty tough to find a right measure tool for all of them. On the desktop front there are Intel, AMD and VIA only, hence, AMD may orientate its rating on the Pentium 4 performance. On the server market it is all far more complex, as a result, AMD will have to show true performance of their new product, not estimated performance and any kinds of ratings in order not to mislead its potential clients and be successful on the new market.

AMD Opteron processors based on the x86-64 architecture will debut by the end of the first quarter this year with 1.40 and 1.60GHz versions, sources indicated.