Market research agency Jon Peddie Research (JPR) said in a recent report that the share of Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron microprocessors in workstations has grown significantly in the past 18 months, but the overall share was still 2%, much less compared to the share of Intel Corp.’s Pentium and Xeon processors.

“Despite Opteron’s current advantages over Xeon, AMD’s gains are not necessarily coming at Intel’s expense. We’ve seen Xeon’s share drop a bit, but overall Intel’s share has stayed generally flat. And we’re seeing a good chunk of Opteron sales going into spaces previously dominated by traditional proprietary platforms like Sun’s UltraSPARC, HP's PA-RISC and IBM's POWER,” Alex Herrera, a JPR analyst, said in a research.

According to the research, workstation vendors shipped 503.8 thousand branded workstations in the second quarter of 2005, accounting for almost $1.3 billion in revenue. Dell continues to dominate the workstation market with a share of about 43%, and HP follows, recently narrowing Dell’s lead slightly. Lenovo has jumped directly to the No.3 position, thanks to picking up ThinkPad-branded mobile workstations from IBM. IBM, Sun and Fujitsu-Siemens round out the top six.

Intel Corp.’s Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium M as well as Xeon processors are used in 93% of workstations, whereas Advanced Micro Devices’ share is 2%, JPR claims.

“After signing on major OEMs in the past 18 months, AMD’s Opteron processor penetration into workstations is growing strongly, roughly doubling its share over the past three quarters,” a statement from JPR claims.

The analyst firm believes that things like dual-core processors, 64-bit extensions are becoming interesting options for clients, which supports higher average sale prices (ASPs) as well as boosts revenues.