I thought I remember one datapoint showing that Opteron gained 27% of the U.S. MP server business.
Me...
This area, of server market share, seems to be confusing because everyone making their estimates uses different data. The less than 10% figure seems to include everything that can possibly be classified as a server.
Yes, I expect to see big gains in AMD q2 server sales, and continuing through the rest of the year. The recent design wins you enumerate, seem to indicate that the OEM's are finally being forced to respond to customer demand for AMD servers.
Undoubtedly, there are a lot of INTC users that will see advantages in staying with INTC. These aren't AMD's target market. What AMD is going after is the customers that see advantages in AMD products, but for whatever reasons remain tied to INTC. There looks to be enough of those guys to get AMD to the 30% to 35% market share AMD needs to reach critical mass.
Platformization is, to me, just another name for vertical integration. Undoubtedly this is the future as more and more space becomes available on processors that needs to be filled. The problem for INTC, in leading the charge, is that a lot of the industry rightly feels threatened by the move. To many suppliers INTC will be seen as setting themselves up against the whole industry.
Another problem is that this move to platformization further reduces the ability of the OEMs to differentiate their product from what everyone else is selling. This model would undoubtedly appeal to DELL, but the rest of the industry will probably be looking for other alternatives which should help AMD. In any case platformization isn't going to be a slam dunk for INTC, but is definitely where the industry is moving.
Oh, and if INTC insists on this one size fits all thing, they better do it right. What this does is concentrate INTC's eggs in fewer baskets and those baskets had better not have any holes in them.
