AMD launched its new weapon to serve in the Cold War against Intel. (Read more about the specs.) "Opteron's success stems from its simplicity. When we changed from single to dual core, we maintained the same socket, thermals and motherboard. That keeps it predictable for IT managers as they plan their data centers," said Vladimir Rozanovich, director of North America commercial business for AMD, of Sunnyvale, California. Vendors applaud the chip's support of virtualization and DDR2 memory, and its ability to maintain constant electrical and thermal boundaries as it rises from dual-core design today to quad-core in 2007.

The Opteron chip was introduced for the first time in April 2003, and after some initial problems due to Intel, who had the market all for itself, the chip gained recognition as it came to be considered superior in technology to Intel.

Today, vendors (including HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems) have announced plans to sell servers using the next generation of AMD Opteron Processors. AMD hopes that the chip will preserve its recent gains in market share. The company has watched sales going up since Opteron. This has driven server sellers like Dell and IBM to launch AMD-based machines in recent months. By the end of 2006, Opteron chips will be used in 50 tier-one server platforms, double the number in 2005, according to Rozanovich. Indeed, AMD posted 25.9 percent share of the market for x86-based servers in the second quarter of 2006, which is a strong 133 percent increase from the same quarter last year (Mercury Research data).

AMD will sell the new Opteron in three power levels. The mainstream line runs at 95 watts. A high-performance "SE" version will run at 120 watts for a series of Sun servers, and a low power "HE" version will run at 68 watts for servers used in the financial services and oil and gas exploration markets. Further divisions in the new chip line are the three server sizes. The Opteron 1000 series are appropriate for single-chip servers and workstations, while the 2000 series will fit two-processor machines, and the 8000 series will fit four- and eight-chip machines.

Priced in one thousand-unit quantities, the chips cost US $ 2,149 for the Opteron 8218, $ 873 for the Opteron 2218 and $ 749 for the Opteron 1218. All three chips run at 2.6 GHz, but there are other variations, ranging from 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz.
The company also announced it has completed the design, or tape-out, of its quad-core Opteron processors, and production is expected to start mid-2007. Meanwhile, all the major virtualization software companies, including Microsoft, SWsoft, VMware, and ZenSource announced support for AMD's virtualization technology.