Austin based company Newisys, who develops high-end servers based on AMD Opteron processors, said on Friday in an interview for this site that they plan to sell their AMD based platforms to major computer vendors “such as Dell and IBM”, according to the company`s spokesman.

Newisys` strategy is to stay behind the scene, developing and manufacturing Opteron based platforms, and to sell its servers to the vendors, who do not build such systems. Although the company and its spokespersons are tight-lipped about their future clients, smiling on a mention about IBM, some analysts claim that both Dell and IBM are very interested in Newisys. Co-founder Phil Hestert told that IBM gave him its blessing to leave to start Newisys, at the same time, taking away a huge team of specialists with him. A lot of engineers from Dell now also work at Newisys. I can hardly imagine that a lot of talented developers left their companies to start working on a platform without perspectives. Moreover, it seems that both vendors were completely aware about this company when their workers left them for Newisys.

Currently the company have already developed two-way and four-way server modules based on AMD Opteron CPUs. The name of the first one is Khepri (the god of the sunrise in Egyptian mythology), the second one is called Sobek (the goddess of fertility). Newisys` main target is to roll-out 8, 16 and 32-way systems powered by the x86-64 processors.

Although some analysts are quite sceptical about x86-64 CPUs, telling that AMD will need to persuade the industry in shortest time possible to support their innovation, what is not so easy at all. The newcomers are set to be launched by the end of the 2002 and keeping in mind that it took Intel a year or even a bit more to convince the software developers to support Pentium 4 specific instruction, it is quite clear that there will be not a lot of obvious advantages of the new CPUs compared to its IA32 rivals at launch. However, the one and very important feature of Opteron is the support of more than 4GB of RAM (up to 2 in 64th degree). Analysts predict that in the next 18 month, web-servers with 16GB of RAM will be needed, so, that is where the Opteron processors are aimed at. Taking into the account the fact that the Opteron CPUs will not be as expensive as Intel`s Itanium processors, it is clear that they will find its place under the sun.

Although it is quite strange that one company will manufacture AMD Opteron based servers for major computer vendors, there are a lot of advantages in this approach. Firstly, all x86-64 servers will be of the same highest quality, secondly, they will be easy to assist, thirdly, it will certainly help AMD to hold the hand on the market`s pulse, finally, it will be cheaper for the vendors to buy a solution and resell it without investing in R&D, helping to leverage the architecture on the market. Of course, those, who want, can develop their own platforms based on AMD Opteron.

Well, it seems that the x86-64 is a tasty thing. Let us wait and see how the market will meet it.