As part of the build-up toward launching our six-core “Istanbul” processor in June, this is part two of a multi-part blog looking back on the first year of the AMD Opteron™ processor as seen through my personal lens working in AMD Communications.

Starting in third quarter of 2003 following IBM’s launch of its 1U, 2P e325 server, AMD Opteron was slowly building momentum and creating industry buzz. IT customers in the financial services sector who were doing testing on a variety of different AMD Opteron-based systems were seeing impressive results, particularly in 4-processor servers. It was soon clear that the Wall Street IT community talks amongst themselves about technology, and word was spreading quickly about the results they were seeing. The tech press and analysts were starting to catch this feedback indirectly through the Wall Street analysts who heard the chatter from their IT guys.

While this critical end-customer community liked what they were seeing with AMD Opteron, none of them could commit to any large-scale deployments due to lack of enterprise-class systems from a tier-one OEM. The IBM e325 was great for HPC environments, but lacked many of the features required in datacenters.

There are no secrets

This is what I quickly learned about life as a public relations professional in the PC business, it seems like no secret is safe. While not on the same scale, I can sympathize with my PR brethren in the pro sports business trying to keep potential player trades and signings under wraps until negotiations are finalized. Once negotiations between Sun and AMD kicked into high gear the third quarter of 2003, it suddenly became public knowledge. More than two months before Sun announced it planned to offer x86 servers based on AMD Opteron, word was already leaking out.  While we were fending off the press with our standard “can’t comment on rumor and speculation” or “you’ll need to contact Sun regarding its future server plans,” there was lots of enthusiasm internally over the upcoming deal with Sun that was code-named “Stinger.”

Even though Sun had little presence with x86 servers at the time, they had a rich history of server innovation and a great reputation for delivering a legitimate enterprise-class solution stack. They were going to launch a diverse portfolio of AMD servers and optimize the Solaris operating system for AMD64. It was a huge morale boost internally and was the start of many activities over the next 6 months that would cast a spotlight on AMD Opteron.

Going back to my earlier point regarding no secrets, two weeks before the announcement, CNET’s Stephen Shankland broke more news on the Sun-AMD partnership, including the announcement date.  After that point, the only unknown was how many and what form factor servers they were planning to offer. At his keynote at Comdex, CEO Scott McNealy revealed Sun’s plans for a broad partnership with AMD, details of that announcement can be found here.

A strong finish

While Sun would not begin shipping AMD Opteron servers until early the next year, the announcement gave us more of what we really needed at the time: credibility. It was a turning point in demonstrating that AMD Opteron was more than just an HPC solution.

As 2003 came to a close, AMD Opteron had been in the market for about eight months and market share numbers were starting to show some impact. While most of the early AMD Opteron servers were shipped into HPC environments, there was enough traction for analyst firms such as IDC to start tracking systems that were based on AMD Opteron processors. In December 2003 IDC issued its third quarter system share numbers and a number of reporters latched on to the fact that the AMD Opteron processor was shipped in more servers than Intel’s Itanium processor.

Our intent was never to go after Itanium’s market share as we knew we couldn’t be successful if that was our goal. Both Itanium and AMD Opteron were 64-bit processors but that’s where the similarities ended. AMD Opteron was perhaps the best x86 server processor available by the end of 2003 and our objective was to bring 64-bit into the mainstream server market, not the proprietary space Itanium was playing in. Intel soon recognized this and my next blog will discuss the new battleground that emerged in 2004.

I’ll conclude with this excerpt from an end of year wrap-up story InfoWorld ran at the end of 2003:

“AMD’s Opteron processor truly is the Little Engine That Could. When Opteron launched in April, the Intel x86-compatible 64-bit processor faced a steep uphill battle against Intel’s Itanium. By year’s end, IBM and Microsoft delivered on early promises, and Sun joined the bandwagon. Will Dell and HP be next, or can’t they see Opteron from where they sit behind Intel?”

 Up next: “Swordfish anyone?”

Phil Hughes is a senior public relations manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.