WORD OUT of HP central is starting to sound more and more schizophrenic, at least as far as chip choices are concerned. It co-developed the Itanium with Intel, and are one of it's biggest backers. It also sells the lion's share of the systems, last time I saw the numbers distilled into a journalist-understandable graph, there was HP with about 90% of the market, and there was a category called other. On the corporate desktop side, it was the only tier1 maker to offer an AMD PC aimed at the business sector, HP, everyone else was pure Intel. The home PC market was a different story, with HP having tons of Athlon PCs in that market, and by all accounts, doing quite well with them. The overall status quo was Intel on top, AMD begging for scraps, with the occasional win.
Then came the Opteron and Athlon64, what was HP to do? Whatever it did, it was doing it behind the scenes, and very quietly. No need to upset Intel with a product that might never 'exist' now is there? So, the few HP beavers that haven't been shown the door at ISS and other places are plotting, planning and engineering away. As of this writing, AMD has the x86 speed crown in both the server and gaming/desktop side, but the chips that hold those titles represent an infinitesimal slice of the market.
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News source: The Inq
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