4 The Hard Way

Tier-one OEMs Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems made notable appearances at the Sept. 10 launch event. HP, which ships 37 percent of all Opteron-based servers, said it will start shipping AMD quad-core systems through its x86 ProLiant line beginning in the fourth quarter.

AMD Platinum partner Appro International will be moving quad-core Opterons into its customers' data centers and workstations even sooner, said Maria McLaughlin, director of marketing at the Milpitas, Calif., high-performance computing OEM. "We're putting together a lot of big deals with Barcelona already. But the sales cycle takes a lot of time. We're cooking up a big deal that we'll announce in October with a major data center," she said.

One early bone of contention in the channel was the release of quad-core samples to system builder partners. Some say they received their quad-cores a mere week before the launch date.

Dominic Daninger of Nor-Tech subsidiary Reason said he'd have liked to have received Barcelona samples sooner. He suspects that issues with processor speed caused sample delays, not to mention the delay of the product release itself.

"I think they had a lot of trouble getting the speed up to where they'd like to have it. A lot of what you read over the last several months is that they had trouble with that. But I've also heard that the silicon for the Phenom [AMD's quad-core desktop CPU] is really coming out well, as far as speed," said Daninger, vice president of engineering at the Burnsville, Minn.-based maker of high-end engineering workstations.

McLaughlin said AMD provided Appro with Barcelona samples well ahead of the launch.

"We had one at LinuxWorld [in mid-August] that was pretty good," McLaughlin said. "Everything they've been stating in terms of power and memory in terms of bandwidth, and having the native quad-core and floating point, have been the biggest things for processor-intensive computing," she said.

Rumors of dissatisfaction about sample releases were not lost on Intel. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip leader told CRN, "Usually before a major launch, we have samples out at least a month before."

Randy Allen, head of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's Server and Workstation Division and the engineering leader of the original Opteron team, addressed the issue at a press lunch the day of the launch. He said AMD had trouble meeting the sample demands of many of its partners, from tier-ones on down, due to more requests than they had expected.

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, also at the lunch, noted that there are some differences in the business relationships AMD has with its tier-one and Platinum OEM partners and with others, and that the chip maker values the channel highly.

"We've got 'commitment to the channel' tattooed on our butts at AMD," Ruiz said.

Ruiz said AMD has prepared its tier-one OEMs and channel partners to hit the ground running with Barcelona.

"We have nine validated server platforms at launch, a first for AMD, and AMD's channel partners can be early to market with quad-core AMD Opteron processor-based solutions. We have more than 50 quad-core-ready platforms available through leading OEMs like Acer, Cray, Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Gateway, HP, IBM and Sun for the VAR community. All of these are upgradable to quad-core AMD Opteron processors with a switch of the chip and a BIOS flash," he said.

Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron thinks the speed at which AMD is planning to get its x86 quad-core into servers and workstations makes up for some of the time lost to Intel.

"The product that AMD is introducing will drop into existing dual-core server sockets pretty easily. A lot of their OEM customers are waiting for this product to do a platform refresh themselves. We should see a rapid conversion to Barcelona products, basically right at launch," McCarron said.

"What we'll end up seeing is a repeat of what we saw with the original Opteron," he added. "It did take several years for them to get significant presence with the original Opteron, to get those tier-one OEMs. And now they have the OEMs to drop in quad-core, and waiting for it. So the ramp-up for the quad-core is likely to be significantly faster than with the original Opteron. Factor in the time AMD has fallen behind Intel on quad-core, and it about evens out."

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