CHIP FIRM AMD said today that it will introduce Opterons that require only 55 watts and 30 watts during the first half of 2004. The mid and low power Opterons will be offered in its 100, 200 and 800 series range of server chips.
It"s obvious from the announcement, made at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, that AMD is targeting blade and storage devices, an area that Intel"s had all to itself in the X86 market so far. Sun Microsystems might well be interested in these low powered 64-bit chips, we"d hazard. The chips will also be useful for clusters and for entry level servers too. Only last week, Intel released an LV Itanium.