AMD Opterons would better position Dell to compete with Hewlett-Packard in lower end enterprise markets, Shannon said. He suspects Dell doesn't currently have its eye on the "big iron" server markets dominated by IBM, HP and to a lesser extent by Sun Microsystems and SGI.
Also looming is Microsoft's much-delayed 64-bit software that is likely to spur Opteron performance and growth. The Microsoft software is scheduled to be delivered next year and it is expected to work well with Opteron machines.
Intel, too, has 64-bit computing, but its high-performance Itanium machine, while boasting very high performance, is still expensive for lower performance server applications. Intel has additional 64-bit approaches but they have been somewhat late to market.
Intel isn't likely to sit back and watch AMD poach on what it has considered its territory. The firm has said it will beef up features in two future Itanium family chips, for instance. Intel has said it has been successful in improving price/performance and in trimming power consumption and there will be more improvements to come.
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