by Anton Shilov
07/20/2006 | 11:48 PM
Advanced Micro Devices and International Business Machines are expected to announce a technology alliance, under which IBM’s mainstream servers will feature microprocessors by AMD. This may further boost positions of the Opteron chips and pressure Intel’s server market share.
While IBM was the first server maker to adopt the Opteron, it only sold such systems as high-performance computing options, a market, which is much smaller than that of mainstream servers used by organizations. This is going to change starting from August 1, when, at an even in
“A tighter AMD partnership would make sense [for IBM]. It’s something that we’ve heard customers wanting IBM to explore for some time now,” said Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty. “IBM may have forborne tightening ties with AMD until now because "they may have been afraid of injuring the Intel relationship.”
AMD reportedly plans to unveil its new dual-core AMD Opteron processors with two cores in mid-August. The chips will sport dual-channel DDR2 memory controller in addition to virtualization technology, while the new socket F infrastructure will be compatible with AMD’s quad-core microprocessors.
But in addition to putting more AMD Opteron processors into servers, IBM and AMD may leverage their existing manufacturing technology development partnership to actual product development partnership, the web-site claims. A deeper partnership between IBM and AMD could take several forms, ranging from joint technology development to work on mainstream dual-processor servers. It might even cover the creation of more-powerful multiprocessor machines that could rival IBM’s current Intel-based 32-processor, the System x3950, formerly called the x460.
Neither AMD, nor IBM, commented on the news-story.