The AMD Opteron may hit Intel where it hurts, in its pocket.
That"s the message editor Kevin Krewell is promoting in the latest edition of the Microprocessor Report. Krewell says in the article that the Opteron versus Intel"s Itanium is only interesting when customers want to move to 64-bits and when price and performance is an element in a buying choice. But Krewell said that the battle between the Opteron and the Xeon MP is more interesting. He claims that AMD has gained "a significant foothold" with very competitive 2P and 4P system performance.
He"s right that Intel isn"t going to curl up and go away, and sources inside the chip giant do believe that the Xeon marketplace is where the Opteron will compete. Xeon MPs are anything but inexpensive. The latest 2.8GHz MP model with 2MB of cache, for example, costs $3,692 when bought in quantity. On the other hand, Intel has already entered into the low end of the server price market when it introduced its 3.06GHz 1MHz Xeon with 1MB of level three cache and 512K of level two cache.