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AMD Server Market Share Raises

Mercury Research latest figures are not something Intel would love to see. AMD`s Opteron CPUs are holding 22 percent of the x86 server market. The figures are refereeing to worldwide distribution at 2006`s first quarter. This is an 8 point increase compared to the last quarter.

Demski pointed to new Opterons coming later this summer that use DDR-2 memory, which Intel already uses. However, AMD will continue to integrate its memory controller to the processor, considered a more efficient design than Intel, which uses an external memory controller with its own power requirements. In related news, the Hyper Transport Consortium released version 3.0 of the Hyper Transport specification. Developed by AMD, Hyper Transport is an integration technology designed to increase communication speed between integrated circuits in a computer.

At Monday`s vPro event and other forums Intel has noted the power saving efficiency of its forthcoming chips. Intel`s CEO Paul Otellini said on Monday that Intel could save a company deploying 50,000 Conroe-based PCs over $1.5 million in energy costs over the lifetime of those systems (typically four years) versus earlier Intel-based models. However, AMD also has a strong performance-per-watt story for systems already in the market. "I give Intel credit in selling that message that they`re going to have great power efficiency," Steve Demski, AMD Opteron product manager, told internetnews.com. "But we have the edge now and we`re not sitting still."

Precise figures for Intel won`t be released until next week, but Mercury analyst Dean McCarron said Intel "makes up most of the rest" of the market at about seventy-five percent.