From the hardware vendors, here's what I learned.

IBM IBM xSeries Server Products (the Intel stuff) media reviews analyst Michael W. Haley basically said there's little or no chance that IBM will build an Opteron-based server. It's easy to see why IBM would be cautious. Not only does IBM already have its hands full with two processor architectures (Intel and PowerPC), the company has so far sunk millions of dollars into its Extended X Architecture; a proprietary chipset that's optimized to work with Intel processors.

I doubled-checked with IBM eServer spokesperson Tim Dallman. "eServer" is the mother brand of all IBM servers--xSeries (Intel), iSeries (AS/400), pSeries (PowerPC-based AIX), and zSeries (the mainframes). Dallman told me: "We continue to evaluate new technologies to ensure that we are going deliver the best value to our customers. With respect to Opteron-based servers, we have not made any announcements regarding Opteron and IBM's family eServer solutions. Beyond that, we don't comment on our future product plans."

While it's difficult to get a consistent reading from IBM--a company that's often mum on products until they're announced--I wouldn't expect to see IBM make a huge commitment to the Opteron any time soon.

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Dell
Dell is the systems manufacturer that Prudential's Mosesmann hinted was the tier-one vendor that was seriously interested in Opteron Ten years ago, when I interviewed Michael Dell in front of an audience of about 250 people, I asked him why he didn't shave the prices of his systems even more by going with AMD. So he turned to the audience and asked, "If I could save you 50 bucks, how many of you would be interested?" About half the audience raised their hands. Ten years later, Dell has never sold a product with an AMD processor. Never.

Referring to Opteron, Dell spokesperson Bruce Anderson told me "Our strategy is 100-percent customer driven. If you talk to any number of our enterprise customers, our strategy is relatively easy to determine and so far, we haven't seen the interest in Opteron. We are, however, aware of AMD's plans, we talk to them as well as all other processor manufacturers all the time, but have not announced any plans ourselves. If there's sufficient demand for that technology, we'll bring a product to market, and we'll bring it to market faster than anybody else and apply the efficiencies of our direct model in a way that makes the cost manageable."

Based on my experience with Dell, which is rightfully ultraconservative with its business decisions, when it says its 100 percent customer driven, I take that to mean a significant share of customers have to be asking for it. For example, the company still doesn't sell a handheld system because it thinks the market has not matured enough. And, the company doesn't see enough justification from customer demand to start pumping out Itanium 2 machines. So, imagine what sort of demand would have to exist before it started to include sell AMD Opteron servers?

HP
Staying respectful of some important relationships, Hewlett-Packard Business Critical Systems worldwide product line manager Brian Cox said "AMD is quite a big partner of HP's. We do a big business with them in laptops and desktops primarily in the consumer space so they are a very important partner. But, I haven't had a customer say they won't buy a server from me unless it had an AMD chip in there, and frankly we are a customer-driven company."

But instincts about the market and AMD's resources also seem to drive Cox's decisions. "I like the AMD guys. They're gutsy. But compared to Intel's scale, it will be a daunting challenge for AMD to come up with yet another 64-bit architecture. There are already 20 different hardware vendors producing servers and workstations based on Intel's architecture and the software vendors like this. For them, it's less attractive to see another 64-bit architecture emerge. As the co-developers of Itanium, HP and Intel have both spent billions of dollars to bring Itanium to market and it has a design that can last 20 years. Again, AMD is a great partner of HP's, but you have to look at it honestly. Are the deep pockets there and do they have the resources to develop this ecosystem and make it thrive? It could happen but it will be a challenge."

So, currently, as far as I can tell, no tier one systems vendor is ready to express any serious interest in Opteron. For good measure, I asked the folks at Fujitsu. They make refrigerator-sized multiprocessor systems and they didn't express interest in the Opteron. .

I called back AMD to share my findings and get their response. I spoke with Kevin Knox, AMD's enterprise segment marketing and business development director, who said: "I can assure you that we are working very closely with IBM, Dell, and HP on Opteron and are seeing strong interest from them as well as other OEMs," Knox said. "We're just further along with some than others. Obviously we have to have confidentiality with our OEM partners, but we're not seeing what you're hearing as far as our interactions with them are concerned."

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