One year has passed since the announcement of AMD Opteron processors. Looking firmly forward, AMD"s chief executive officer is pretty confident about the future of his company"s technology and is anticipating the next big thing with microprocessors – affordable dual-core technology that is going to hit the ground in 2005.
AMD"s Strong Roadmap
"We have roadmap that when you look 12 months out, it is pretty firm. You look 12 to 24 months, and it is almost firm. And then you look beyond that, and it is always subject to modifications of the market. When we look out to, say, the end of 2005, we are enabling customers to really create a tremendous breadth of product lines," AMD"s CEO Hector Ruiz said in an interview to eWeek.
AMD sold around 40 thousand of AMD Opteron processors in 2003, according to Smith Barney"s estimations, but the vast majority of such chips were intended for 2-way systems. The company managed to supply approximately 3200 processors for 4-way systems to power some 800 servers. While 4P, 8P and higher-end machines are not sold in massive quantities, they represent the most lucrative part of the market. But the customers who adopt enterprise-class machines with four or more CPUs have to be absolutely confident in technology they acquire and deploy.