AMD exec looks back on year that was

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) Dirk Meyer has presided over many chip development teams, including two of Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha processors and AMD's seventh-generation Athlon XP processors. But as senior vice president of AMD's Computation Products Group, lately his job has meant more time spent in front of airport security screeners than processor designers as he travels around evangelizing AMD's eighth-generation Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.

One year after Opteron's introduction in New York, Meyer was back in the city talking up Opteron for a group of financial services customers. However, he took some time while there for a phone interview with IDG News Service about the progress of Opteron from the breathless hype of the prelaunch marketing to the steady progress the chip has made with server manufacturers and customers in the enterprise world over the past year.

IDGNS: What do you need to do to make sure Opteron builds upon the toehold it has taken in the enterprise this year?

Meyer: Much of the initial adoption was in the high-performance technical computing clusters, and as we look forward, we aim to continue to be strong in that space, but also grow across the breadth of the enterprise. Interestingly, what’s required there isn’t so much more of a different technology beyond that which we are delivering today, but rather the right sorts of relationships with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) who will put Opteron in enterprise class boxes.

We’re fortunate in that we now have those sorts of relationships, and you’ll be seeing some of those products out in the market. In fact, HP (Hewlett-Packard Co.) is out there now with enterprise-class (four-processor) systems. So, the near-term objective is to broaden our relationship with our tier one OEM customers to get the Opteron platform available (in servers) that are more suited to the general needs of the enterprise.

The next step of course, is the software ecosystem around AMD64, although the good news there is that that’s not immediately required because Opteron is such a good 32-bit product.

IDGNS: How important is Intel Corp.’s decision to enter the market in building out that ecosystem?

Meyer: I think it’s going to accelerate the rate at which AMD64’s ecosystem gets developed. Now that Intel is there with the same instruction set, essentially, the business case is even more clear to the ISVs (independent software vendors). I think that decision by Intel only serves to accelerate adoption of AMD64.

IDGNS: How many customers are currently running 64-bit applications on their Opteron boxes?

Meyer: Actually, in the HPC (high performance computing) space, on top of Linux, that’s where we see it mostly today. In the enterprise, the pickup is a little slower, largely because they have such long certification cycles. We see 64-bit Linux out there that people are playing with, and some of the databases people are looking at.

Outside of that, it’s more a 32-bit world with everybody starting to plan their direction toward 64-bits.

IDGNS: Do you think the delay in the Windows availability has retarded that development a little bit?