HP Reveals AMD Alliance, Unveils Opteron Servers

HP's move to embrace Opteron processors, as well as the upcoming Xeon processors with 64-bit extensions that Intel announced last week, does not mean HP is changing its server strategy, said Brad Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Industry Standard Servers Group. "We're still driving HP products on x86 and [Intel] Itanium platforms," he said.

According to Anderson, HP's Opteron move is not so much a play for the 64-bit space, which the vendor will target with Itanium, as it is a move into the higher-performance 32-bit server market. He said the Opteron, with its 64-bit extensions, integrated memory controller, HyperTransport processor-to-processor bus and built-in security features, enables HP to finally target new 32-bit processor applications. Intel's Xeon MP processors have not kept up with Opteron in terms of four-way performance.

"HP-UX customers woke up today and found they have no solid road map," said Larry Singer, senior vice president of global market strategies at Sun Microsystems. "They now find themselves in the same position as [HP's] Tru64 customers."

HP's announcement comes less than two weeks after Sun said it would offer a low-end server based on Opteron technology--the first fruit of Sun's alliance with AMD, which was unveiled in November. For his part, Singer sounded almost gleeful about HP's embracing both AMD's 64-bit Opteron and Intel's Xeon with 64-bit extensions, instead of focusing solely on Itanium.

"Intel originally said Itanium will be for 64-bit applications, and 32-bit will go to Xeon," said Singer. "Now Intel is adding 64-bit to Xeon. It's saying its solid commitment to Itanium is no more."

HP's Anderson disagreed with Singer's assessment. "There are some out there trying to confuse the issue," he said. "We are committed to our strategy."

Also Tuesday, HP unveiled the ProLiant DL145, a two-way, 1U server for high-performance computing Web serving, security and streaming media. It also introduced the DL585, a four-way, 7U server for memory-constrained applications such as databases or Microsoft Exchange. Both Opteron-based servers are expected to ship in the first half of 2004.

Later in the year, the company plans to ship a two-way ProLiant blade server with Opteron processors.

During the summer, HP will unveil one-way and two-way ProLiant servers based on 64-bit Xeon processors, with four-way and eight-way models expected next year.