IBM, HP Unveil Dual-Core AMD Systems

In conjunction with AMD's official announcement of the Opteron dual-core processor, IBM drew first blood among server vendors and revealed that it has selected AMD to power several of its eServer and workstation products. Not to be outdone, rival HP also announced that it is upgrading its servers with the chip.

The IBM eServer 326 and IntelliStation A Pro 6217 will feature AMD64 architecture paired with IBM's xSeries design elements. Big Blue is targeting customers that require workstations for specialized tasks, such as digital content creation, product design, movie production, and chip manufacturing.

AMD rival Intel launched its own dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition for desktop PCs earlier this week, but Intel's chips have different design characteristics from AMD's 64-bit implementation. Intel dual core processors are also more consumer-oriented in comparison to AMD's Opteron, which has an architecture that appeals more to the enterprise.

It is these differences, said Mike Kahn, Managing Director of The Clipper Group, that IBM is using to target customers in the aforementioned market segments. "I believe that the AMD Opteron gives these customers more punch than they could get from Intel's Xeon," said Kahn.

Kahn told BetaNews that IBM has a broad offering of services and that the Opteron powered systems are an important addition to the IBM family of products. "Dual-core helps solve real-time problems on workstations; customers are getting the job done faster. IBM is packing chips in ways meaningful to customers: The world revolves around customers - not vendors."

IBM rival HP has upgraded its ProLiant DL580G2 4-way blade server to the new DL585, which utilizes the Opteron 875 platform. With the Opteron at the heart of the system, HP's DL585 now becomes an 8-way server with the same footprint and power consumption as the previous model.

HP's ProLiant is designed for multi-threaded applications and provides high performance computing for those applications.

IBM is making the IntelliStation A Pro 6217 available for ordering on April 26, 2005 with general availability scheduled for June. Pricing starts at $3259 USD. There are no pricing details available for the eServer 326 models at this time.

HP dual-core models are provided in three speed grades and are priced relative to where the single-core models were priced in the United States.