Intel Corp (INTC)

[SemiconEng]

IBM's Opteron ruse falls to long-term Intel love

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/03/ibm_amd_storm/
IBM last month announced its new Hurricane chipset for the xSeries line of servers. The product garnered a lot of attention first for its apparent strength in boosting the memory performance of basic servers. Hurricane also caused a stir because, unlike its predecessor, it won't support Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor. But reporters and analysts largely ignored the fact that IBM shunned Opteron as well when making its future x86 server plans.

Unlike rivals HP and Sun Microsystems, IBM appears to have little desire to make Opteron a central part of its server line. HP and Sun have put considerable investment and energy into creating unique, homegrown Opteron servers. IBM, by contrast, looks content to buy third-party designed Opteron hardware, leaving serious research and development work for Xeon-based systems.