"I'm not surprised that IBM was the first to announce an Opteron system in the technical computing space," said King. "IBM has had its biggest uptick in Opteron servers, and this is a sophisticated add-on to that environment."
AMD aggressively pitches its Opteron processor, which can handle both 32- and 64-bit applications, as the base for systems that can easily transition between today's 32-bit apps and future 64-bit software.
Another advantage of 64-bit computing, said Matt Wineberg, the product manager for IBM's IntelliStation family, is that it breaks the 4GB memory barrier of 32-bit applications. "In some applications, oil and gas exploration, for instance, there's a memory bottleneck [at 4GB]. Applications written for 64-bit processors, however, can access as much as 16GB of memory directly, making for faster processing of complex modeling.
Like the other models in IBM's IntelliStation line -- it already sells models based on Intel's Pentium 4 (the M Pro), Intel's Xeon processor (Z Pro), and the Armonk, N.Y. company's own Power processor (Power 275) -- Big Blue is aiming the Opteron edition at high-power computing tasks, both those in the commercial mainstream, such as computer aided design (CAD), computer aided engineering (CAE), digital content creation, and financial analysis, and niche markets like life science, oil and gas, and drug discovery.
That's a departure for IBM, added Sarang Ghatpande, lead analyst with DH Brown Associates. "IBM previous top-line workstation, the Power-based 275, is aimed at the application base," he said. "Moving to Opteron gives IBM an opportunity to move into new market segments."
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