Posts tagged with AMD 40th Anniversary
Boom or Bust
Posted by Phil Hughes in 4:13 PM
(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)
Loading ...This is the final chapter of my blog looking back on the first year of the AMD OpteronTM processor.
If you’re a fan of professional sports, you know that the stretch from April until the end of June is draft time for the big four North American leagues -- NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. Inevitably during these months, the sports media revisit past drafts and look at some of the biggest draft busts and successes. Take an example from the NFL -- Ryan Leaf (2nd pick, 1st round, 1998) and Tom Brady (199th pick, 6th round 2000) -- epitomize the concepts of bust (Leaf) and boom (Brady.)
Contrast this to the world of microprocessors. The AMD Opteron processor entered the market in April 2003 as a solid, but unproven, option during a time when the industry had been trying to determine if the 64-bit Itanium processor was more hype than substance.
I noted in my first blog that the AMD Opteron processor was met with some skepticism early on due to a lack of initial OEM support. But by the first half of 2004, the AMD Opteron processor was well on its way to being the dark-horse in x86 servers. Sun began to launch the servers it announced late in 2003 and the market was seeing some impressive performance on those systems. In February, the competition did us a big favor when they validated our approach to 64-bit computing by emulating the AMD64 instruction set extensions. In fact, it kicked off the first of several instances in that period where the competition took a page from the AMD playbook (multi-core, processor model numbers and Direct Connect Architecture are just a few more examples of them following the AMD lead.) The competition announcing its plans to incorporate AMD64 extensions served notice to the industry that AMD was ahead of the curve in understanding the needs of enterprise customers.
We had fun at IDF in Feb. 2004 reminding the world who made 64-bit migration easy.
A big helping of “Swordfish”
In the first few months of 2004, the momentum behind the AMD Opteron processor was fast and furious. The teams that supported the AMD Opteron processor were extremely busy but no one was complaining. We all had a lot of sweat equity invested in the AMD Opteron processor and we were now seeing the payoff. While IDF was going on, several of us were working on a project code-name “Swordfish”. “Swordfish” was the codename for our upcoming server launch with HP and it represented probably the biggest milestone for the AMD Opteron processor. Here’s why;
- Most industry watchers assumed HP would probably be the least likely OEM to come on board because of their investment in Itanium;
- HP didn’t make a small commitment to AMD, much like Sun, they went big right out of the gate;
- As the industry-leader, HP’s broad portfolio of AMD servers helped drive the discussion away from AMD being seen as a niche player in HPC;
- HP had a huge footprint among Wall Street IT, which was a critical customer segment for AMD in order to increase our market share.
Slide from HP's launch presentation on February 24, 2004
Rookie of the Year
In April 2004, we went back to NYC to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the launch of the AMD Opteron processor. While our event didn’t quite have the production value that our launch did a year earlier, we opted to go for substance over style. What a stark contrast from a year earlier. IBM was of course back again but joined this time by our new friends from Sun and HP along with an end-user from Verisign.
We had our cake, and ate it too at the AMD Opteron one-year anniversary celebration in NYC
One final thought: at its launch in April 2003, the AMD Opteron processor delivered some unique innovations to an x86 server market hungry for choice. The AMD Opteron processor initially fell into that category of a draft pick that had loads of potential, but not quite a first rounder yet. However, looking back at some of the milestones AMD achieved with the AMD Opteron processor from April 2003 to April 2004, it probably was a clear-cut “Rookie of the Year,” in the x86 server business. Particularly if you read some of the following….
“AMD is viewed as a credible tier-one server processor supplier, which certainly wasn’t the case a year ago,” said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. InfoWorld, April 19, 2004
The Opteron processor has vaulted AMD to the front lines of the competition between IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems--three of the top four server makers. CNET, April 19, 2004
Overall, AMD shattered industry expectations for Opteron’s first year. The fact that the company’s product is even discussed as a serious Intel alternative in the server market is a major accomplishment. The Register, April 23, 2004
There you have it, some great quotes that sum up the first year of AMD Opteron. Perhaps in another year or two, you will see another blog from me about the first year of our Six-Core AMD Opteron processor, also known as “Istanbul”. Thanks for reading.
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.
The Sun Also Rises
Posted by Phil Hughes in 11:44 AM
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.
It started with a single core
Posted by Phil Hughes in 1:01 PM
On April 22 we celebrated the sixth anniversary of the AMD OpteronTM processor launch, the server processor that showed just how ripe for innovation the x86 server market was early this decade. As we move closer to the launch of our six-core “Istanbul” processor in June, below is the first post of a multi-part blog that provides some perspective on the first year of AMD Opteron through the eyes of someone intimately involved in driving awareness for the processor since its launch.
"Hammer" time
I started with the AMD PR team in October 2002, about 7 months before AMD Opteron, then code-named “SledgeHammer,” officially launched at the Hudson Theater in New York City on April 22, 2003. Things such as energy-efficiency, multi-core, performance-per-watt and cloud computing were not part of the discussion back then.
The bridge to 64-bit computing … and credibility
Our lead message then: TCO and ease of migration relative to the fact that we could offer 64-bit computing on an industry-standard architecture with backwards compatibility with existing 32-bit applications. It was a simple one for our audiences to appreciate considering our competitor was going the path of Itanium to get to 64-bit computing. How simple? Well, our tagline initially was “Simplifying Business” and the supporting points were all about investment protection, flexibility, performance and industry support. That last one is probably the most important one for me to expand on a bit further.
The biggest challenge for AMD in the server business in 2003 was credibility. Lots of IT guys loved our desktop processors but we didn’t have any real history in the enterprise. We had only been offering server processors since 2001 (AMD AthlonTM MP processor) and none of our system support for that processor was from tier one OEM customers. In fact, in most of the pre-launch communications we did, our biggest credibility proof point was our relationship with Microsoft and other ISVs. Even though most of our early adopters would ultimately be Linux guys, Microsoft’s support provided credibility to a server solution that did not have tier one OEM support until the day of our launch.
The “bridge to 64-bit computing” image we frequently used in press meetings prior to the 2003 launch
All we need is one. Right?
From a PR perspective, the Bay Area press and analyst tour Kevin Knox, then AMD’s director of commercial business development, and I conducted in February 2003 included several meetings with a strikingly similar dialogue. Nearly all recognized and agreed that the competition made the wrong move with its initial stab at addressing 64-bit computing, but most could not accept the idea of AMD Opteron being successful until tier-one OEMs came on board.
More frustrating at that time was the fact that we were getting seed systems into end-user hands, but no high-profile end customers would go and talk about their positive experience with AMD. Many reporters indicated to us that getting a couple of CIOs to talk on our behalf would generate instant credibility, but unfortunately without tier-one support, their credibility could also be at risk by endorsing AMD Opteron.
When we did launch AMD Opteron, IBM joined us on stage in NYC (you can view the opening launch video here) and said they would be offering a 2 processor system targeted at the HPC market later that summer. While not exactly what we were hoping for, it was definitely a shot in the arm. We figured once one OEM came on board, others would follow suit. Unfortunately that was not the case. We immediately became seen as primarily a solution for HPC and research. No one felt we had the chops to do mission critical, because you couldn’t find AMD Opteron in a mainstream, enterprise-class server from Dell, HP, IBM or Sun. Also, one of our lead messages around 64-bit computing really wasn’t pulling through well because there just weren’t a lot of applications at that time that could take advantage of it.
Buzzkill
Still remains one of our favorites on the PR team
Here we were in the summer of 2003, just a few months removed from the launch and we’re approaching LinuxWorld, which was an emerging enterprise tradeshow at that time. We had no server market share to speak of, and a single OEM SKU that had yet to launch.
My challenges usually came when I would get blindsided by a reporter who had recently spoken to and OEM or system builder who said customers were not asking for AMD Opteron and while they had looked at it, they had no plans to support it. As a PR guy, I’m glad we had IBM as a proof point but that one was starting to wear thin and it kept feeling like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop with the press coverage.
COMING NEXT: The Sun also rises
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.
Life Begins at 40
Posted by Dave Kroll in 2:16 PM
Dave Kroll (center left, back row) and AMD CEO Dirk Meyer (center right, back row) with the AMD team in Hyderabad, India
There’s something special about this place… a spirit at AMD that is unique and different from any company I’ve ever worked (AMD alumni will tell you that, too). May 1 marked AMD’s 40th Anniversary and it’s worth taking the time to reflect on our history, why this company is unique and why AMD’s role in the computer industry is significant and important.
Passion
First, AMD employees possess an indomitable passion to compete and thrive in one of the world’s most complex and challenging industries. At our core, this is what motivates us. Always has, always will.
Treat people with respect
This goes for every day work interactions as well as dealing with customers. We win or lose together as a team. And AMD is a place that doesn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re all human, we have families, personal lives, etc.
We’re not baking brownies here
CPUs and GPUs are arguably the most complex technology humans have ever developed (our upcoming “Istanbul” six-core server processor has more than 900 million transistors on it. Think about that for a second, mind-blowing…)
We drive performance and value for consumers
In 1997, we launched the popular K6 processor that first helped drive PC prices below $1,000, making computers more available to mainstream consumers. And today, we still offer superior value at virtually every price point. No matter how much you want to spend, AMD technology powers many of the best PCs with the best features.
AMD drives innovation
- Despite our chief CPU competitor’s resources approximating 10x ours, we’ve managed to blaze the innovation trail in our industry for10 years running. See for yourself, many of the major innovations in x86 processors have come from your friends at AMD
- In 1999, we launched the AMD AthlonTM processor, AMD’s first CPU that didn’t plug directly into an Intel CPU socket, and leapfrogged Intel with a next-generation CPU that was the first to break the 1GHz barrier.
- In April 2003, we launched the AMD OpteronTM microprocessor with new 64-bit extensions (AMD64) and an integrated memory controller and entered the server market. Intel has followed AMD’s path in 64-bit and multi-core ever since (and must really hate that…)
- We foresaw and drove power-efficiency as a key feature set and continue to offer industry-recognized, optimized power/price/performance CPUs for datacenter virtualization and cloud computing servers.
- We combined forces in 2006 with the great talent of ATI and were first to foresee and drive towards the integration of graphics and microprocessors to support the current and future wave of graphics, HD, video applications. Others are following.
- And we’re not done yet…
Choice matters
- No computer manufacturer anywhere in the world wants or chooses to operate under the thumb of a monopoly supplier (let alone subjugate their brand to an ingredient brand). Despite Intel’s tactics to coerce OEMs not to do business with AMD, we continue to innovate, add value and differentiation, and stay focused on serving our customers. Growing antitrust scrutiny from regulators around the world suggests that time is running out on Intel’s monopoly grip on our industry.
- Ask yourself, what if AMD wasn’t in the space? We might all be using more expensive, Itanium-based PCs — and HD graphics and gaming wouldn’t be anywhere where it is today.
- We play a critical role of offering choice and differentiation in this market. And in a David vs. Goliath fight, trust me, it’s more inspiring and fun to be David. And we never let our David status deter us even when Goliath is clearly breaking the rules as antitrust regulators have shown.
Customers and users matter
- We love to see what people make and do with our technology, from gamers to datacenters. Helping our customers win makes our day.
- Because at the end of the day, we don’t create technology for technology’s sake. We innovate to help people improve the quality of their lives.
So, these are several of the reasons why I and nearly 11,000 AMDers come to work each day. We love pushing the envelope of innovation – designing and building amazing computing and graphics technology to excite people, improve the quality of their lives and enjoyment of technology. And AMD is sticky, once an AMDer, always an AMDer – and a thank you and congrats to all those who’ve worked here at some point.
So yes, when so many tech companies live and died in a fraction of the time AMD has endured, we’re proud to be 40. We’ll see you at 50…
Nigel Dessau 40th Anniversary blog: 40 is the new 20
Patrick Moorhead 40th Anniversary blog: AMD: 40 years of “Just doing it”
Dave Kroll is Vice President, Global Communications 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
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