By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IT shops buy current products, but they always have their eyes out one or two generations to assure themselves they aren’t buying into a dead-end product. Which is why makers of chips and other components that go into systems as well as system makers themselves are forced to talk about the future when what they really want to do is focus on this quarter, right now. And so it is with the future “Bulldozer” cores expected in 2011 from Advanced Micro Devices.
The pressure to compete now and in the future is high, and the competition between AMD and Intel is intense. The etching on the six-core “Istanbul” Opteron 2400 and 8400 processors, launched in June, is barely dry, and they have barely ramped to volume among the server makers. But in September, AMD talked up its future homegrown chipsets, and in November, it trumpeted the next-generation of Opteron processors, the “Magny-Cours” Opteron 6100s for two-socket and four-socket servers and the “Lisbon” Opteron 4100s for uniprocessor and two-socket boxes.
