AMD's initial goal for the Opteron to get a large portion of the quad core server market is one step closer to reality, following an announcement that the CPU had been selected by HP for their new Blade servers. HP will be using Opterons exclusively in their Blade servers for now, including ProLiant blades aimed at being used as virtualization servers.
This is good news for AMD - and may have been influenced by the impressive figures AMD managed to get in VMWare's virtualization benchmark last month. Even if they are continuing to lose desktop share to Intel, they are being well-received for servers. As virtualization leaves the "buzz-word" stage and becomes commonplace for businesses to use, moves like this will serve to boost AMD further.