That’s the number of Opteron servers estimated to have been sold last quarter.
That’s not a lot. Less than 1% marketshare. About double the number of Itaniums, but Itaniums aren’t selling for as little as $180, either.
For those who thought Opterons were going to take the world by storm, hell, a few even said that they already had taken the world by storm, well, you were dead wrong
Does that mean Opterons have failed? No, that would be just as wrong and stupid to say.
The point of this article really isn’t about the number of Opteron sales. AMD knows quite well that acceptance of these processors into the server market is going to be a long, slow, haul. They didn’t expect big Opteron sales last quarter. They don’t expect them this quarter. They won’t expect them next quarter, or the quarter after that, or even the quarter after that one.
They know it’s going to take time to crack this market and build up a user base. Before they can even hope to sell any appreciable number, they’ll need big OEMs selling these things, and while they’re making slow progress on that front, they still haven’t persuaded the two biggest server makers (you know about Dell, but HP is actually a bigger player) to sell any, and those who have agreed to sell something are just adding Opterons to their product offerings, not replacing anything else with it.
For AMD to get up to its desktop marketshare in the server market will take years and they’ll be quite satisfied if they have 15-20% marketshare, say, two-three years from now.
And guess what? That would be a success for AMD, and could well be the difference between the company succeeding or failing over the next few years.
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