It is a big change from what these guys were saying alittle over a year ago:
October 9, 2002 Gartner strikes at Yamhill, drives nails into Hammer's coffin " In AMD's case, the analysts don't believe the Opteron meets any of the criteria for new processor adoption--application vendor enthusiasm, server vendor commitment, server vendor enthusiasm, or and customer enthusiasm. Even with OS support from Windows and Linux, unless there's a change in those critical aspects of Opteron's ecosystem, I am standing by my previous assessment: that when it comes to enterprise computing, Opteron is going to be a dud."
February 4, 2004 "HP's Choice of Opteron Chip Will Roil the Server Industry"
I don't know if or who did pay for this latest Gartner piece. I am starting to understand what Keith and others mean when they mention how far AMD has really come.