Mercury Research has claimed that AMD's Opteron processor is holding ten per cent of the x86 server market. If true, this means that in just a couple of years, AMD has managed to grow to become a serious challenge to Intel's business - all thanks to the Opteron processor.

Mercury Research's news figures show that AMD claimed 11.2 per cent of the server processor market in the second quarter. That's up from 7.4 per cent one quarter earlier. More important perhaps than the 51 per cent jump is AMD's march past the ten per cent market share barrier - a self-imposed measure of success for Opteron.
AMD received a spike in processor sales thanks to the dual-core Opteron chip, which Intel has no real match for. However, Intel will very likely claim that we will have to wait for market data from IDC and Gartner to truly ascertain that AMD have crossed the ten per cent mark. If the claims are proved correct, Intel and Dell have a lot to worry about in the shape of AMD.