Last month we heard about the Opteron getting some pretty impressive headway into the market, with upwards of 10% market share. One of the biggest obstacles into getting the Opteron out there has been the lack of versatile memory support. The Opteron was only available in configurations using ECC Buffered RAM only, whereas you could use a Xeon in a board with unbuffered and buffered. That is going to change...
"Based on feedback from our customers, we have enhanced the AMD Opteron processor roadmap by providing our customers more choices for the technology they demand within an infrastructure that best suits their needs,"
Many companies, including Sun and Tyan, are already offering server packages that include the less-costly configuration.. This puts a bit of price pressure on Intel, IBM and other 64bit server CPU producers. Who knows? Perhaps in another year, we'll see AMD reaching that 20% market share