Advanced Micro Devices Inc. intends to position its AMD64 64-bit processor architecture as the ultimate enterprise solution, singling out Intel Corp."s disparate architectures as a weakness. In an odd lunchtime meeting with customers and partners that was part strategy session, part revival and part historical analysis, analysts compared AMD"s Opteron to steel mini-mills, able to process rebar for a fraction of the cost of their more integrated cousins.
Those mini-mills, said Mark Melenovsky, vice president of server research at International Data Corp., were—like Opteron—a disruptive innovation, capable of serving a new customer base with a new set of product offerings. By penetrating the high-performance computing sector with clustered Opteron design wins, he said, AMD could eventually break into the commercial enterprise space and from there into the small and medium-size business market. "Opteron has the potential to push the customer set"s access to 64-bit capability across the entire framework," Melenovsky said.