In a press release made available earlier this week, AMD announced "Emerald", a clustering environment designed to help in R&D and testing. The cluster is the most powerful system AMD has constructed, and is the first time they have made their hardware publically available, to their partners and customers. Beneficial for both AMD and the people using it, AMD clearly knows what they intend.
"AMD is helping set the standard for commercial computing, so Emerald allows customers, partner companies and end users to test and optimize applications across hundreds of dual-core processors. To make Emerald happen, we worked with an outstanding group of industry associates that showcase their extraordinary products alongside our multi-core technology."
The system itself has 144 nodes, each featuring two Opteron 275s, totaling 576 cores, and over a Terabyte of RAM. Now that's x86 power. On the industry standard HPC benchmark suite (designed to test the performance of supercomputers), it has an efficiency rating of 82.8%, one of the highest scores in the market.