"As tough as it was for AMD to launch its x86-64 Opteron, the company will have a tougher road ahead making a dent in rival Intel's market share, according to analysts.
"After four years of research and product development, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based semiconductor maker Tuesday took the wraps off of its 'Sledgehammer' processor. The chip is designed for servers and workstations. It's desktop counterpart, the Athlon 64 (codenamed Clawhammer) is scheduled for a September 2003 release.
"Most significant about Opteron's new architecture is that it runs current 32-bit applications but gives buyers a transition path to 64-bit computing rather than the start-from-scratch approach of Intel's 64-bit Itanium family.
"The company is so confident about the capabilities of its 64-bit line that back in November, AMD President and CEO Hector Ruiz called it a 'Xeon-killer.' The company even maintains the chip will best Itanium's proprietary EPIC architecture. Already partners like Adaptec; Arima; ATI; Computer Associates; Cadence; Cray; LSI Logic; Mandrake; Mentor Graphics; MSI; National Semiconductor; NVIDIA; Oracle; Red Hat; Silicon Image; Sun Microsystems; SuSE Linux; Trident; and UnitedLinux have pledged support for the Opteron server chips. AMD says all the top-tier vendors are looking at ways of using the processor..."
