Advanced Micro Devices uses Soitec wafers for its Opteron computer server chips and Athlon 64 PCchips.
On Thursday, AMD announced the widespread availability of its new 45-nanometer quad-core Opteron processor ahead of schedule.
The AMD Opteron 3000 series offering is designed for hosting customers who require dedicated servers for their customers.
ENGADGET: AMD ships '16-core' Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200
Apart from Sun, which has little love for Intel, AMD had trouble getting anyone to publicly endorse Opteron.
In April 2003, AMD released Opteron, a fancy new chip designed for servers.
The system contains 18, 688 nodes, with each node containing an AMD 16-core Opteron and a NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator.
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Moreover the Opteron 6000 and 4000 series processors continue to gain traction.
Soon the courts will get to hear both versions of the story while Opteron, at least for now, collects a lot of dust.
At first, Opteron helped AMD inch up its share of the server chip market from 4.1% in early 2003 to 6.9% 15 months later.
While both Opteron and Itanium ran newer 64-bit software, AMD's chip was also backward-compatible, enabling it to run software written for older 32-bit processors.
Sun just put Opteron in a new workstation product, for example.
The Cray XK7 system contains 18, 688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator.
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Come summer Intel will debut a whole line of similarly low-power chips based on the Centrino laptop design to take on Opteron in all server categories.
So, according to AMD, Opteron, while technically a better mousetrap, never got to prove itself because Intel made sure nobody used it without paying a heavy price.
In October the Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced an effort to build the world's fastest supercomputer, which will use AMD Opteron chips and 18, 000 of Nvidia's graphics-processing units.
It's AMD, with one-seventh of Intel's revenue, that has been exuding Intel-like cockiness--making predictions that its server processor called Opteron will be in twice as many server designs this year.
Additionally, the new line-up of Opteron chips based on the Bulldozer micro-architecture further strengthens AMD?s ability to offer greater choices to a data-starved base of enterprises and growing cloud customers.
This upside is justifiable if AMD can replicate the success it had with the Opteron series of processors in 2006 with its bulldozer chips to be launched in Q3 as well as its growth in supercomputing technology.
Now it is up to customer demand to deliver those top-line numbers--in particular, demand for flash memory chips in advanced cell phones as well as strong sales of AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor for computer servers, due to launch on April 22.
Leading OEMs are now offering cloud, enterprise and HPC customers a full suite of solutions based on the industry's most comprehensive server processor portfolio, the new AMD Opteron family of processors which deliver an inspired balance of performance, scalability and efficiency.
ENGADGET: AMD ships '16-core' Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200
The lawsuit claims that Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ) specifically asked server supplier NEC (nasdaq: NIPNY - news - people ) to design an Opteron-based model, but that NEC inexplicably shelved the product, never marketing it to any other customers.
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