AMD launches Dell's four-core Opteron boxes

Issues ode to joy

By Ashlee Vance in London • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 16th April 2008 09:53 GMT

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Dell's Opteron experience hasn't been all that fantastic. After resisting the Opteron push for so long, Dell embraced AMD's flashy chip just as Intel started to catch up on performance and performance per watt metrics with Xeon. Then, Dell watched as AMD shot itself in the chest with the four-core Barcelona roll out. Dell was left with a bunch of designs that needed the MIA four-core Opteron and surely plenty of questions about why it bothered with AMD at all.

But despite such displeasure, Dell has invested in AMD and remains committed to Opteron for the foreseeable future. So, it upgraded five server boxes with Barcelona – now that the chip is finally shipping without flaws.

Customers can find four-core Opterons in the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970 and 6950 servers and the M605 blade box. There's also the PowerEdge T605 tower unit. All of those are two-socket boxes except for the four-socket 6950.

We're still waiting on Dell's Veso virtualization appliance that was, er, meant to ship in November with a pair of four-core Opteron chips. The box packs in a ton of memory and an embedded hypervisor. Dell had wagged the kit in front of customers to show how ahead of the compeittion it was in the virtualization game. AMD messed up the program just a bit by shipping Barcelona about nine months late. Oh well.

Anyway, AMD was so thrilled about Dell's Barcelona server launch that the chip company issued its own release touting the new gear alongside Dell's own celebratory hardware missive. ®

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