Acer has crafted a dual-core Opteron based server for the European market that it thinks will crack open new sales of the powerful chip to SMBs.

The Acer Altos G5350 arrives in July as a tower system with either single or dual-core Opteron chips. So, the two-socket box can hold as many as four processor cores, making it a serious low-end workhorse. Customers could use the server for file, print, web and application serving tasks.

Acer will ship the server with up to 16GB of memory, six PCI slots, Ultra320 SCSI drives and Version 7.0 of the Acer Server Manager software. Novell already appears to have certified the box as a development system, outfitting a unit with Ultra320 SCSI drives, 4GB of memory and an ATI graphics chip. Acer will support NetWare 6.5, Windows Server x64 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat EAS 4.0 and SuSE ES 9.0.

This latest system adds to a vibrant market of Opteron server sellers that includes the likes of HP and Sun Microsystems along with smaller players here in the US such as EBS. AMD, however, charged this week that Intel has unfairly used its might in the processor market to block sales of Opteron gear. ®

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