Keith,
From the article:
The company hopes Barcelona will allow AMD to finally break into the low-end server segment, including one-chip and two-chip computers and tower PCs as well as rack mounted servers.
"We're not yet in the SMB segment; it represents for us a great volume opportunity since we have so little market share now," said Kevin Knox, vice president of AMD's commercial business, on Wednesday.
Overall, I believe quad core single socket (with plenty of memory slots) is all that's needed for the vast majority of the server buyers. It is not, however, what Intel and AMD want buyers to "discover" since 2 and 4 socket servers are much more profitable.
BTW, single socket quad core servers can, curiously, be faster in lightly loaded environments than > 1S, since there are no delay for memory coherency checks.
It is only when you have extremely high load (loading all the cores) when gains from processing power of extra cores outweighs memory access penalty.
You may have noticed that when AMD released FX, on many (most) of Anand's tests, single FX outperformed dual FX...
Joe
