siliconvalley.internet.com: Opteron Won’t Kill Xeon… Yet

“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…”

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