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At the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco, IBM duly launched its eServer entry servers using the 64-bit "SledgeHammer" Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. IBM had promised to deliver real machines for real customers when the Opterons debuted back in April, effectively becoming the tier one server vendor that AMD desperately needs to make the Opterons compete in the market against Intel's 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanium processors.

And in a funny twist, Big Blue made a splash by announcing that it had partnered with Intel to deliver an 11 teraflops cluster of Opteron and Itanium machines to Japan's national Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, beating out a competing bid reportedly from rival Hewlett-Packard Co and Intel that pitched only Itanium machinery.

The new Opteron server from IBM, as previously reported, is not branded under the xSeries moniker that IBM uses to designate both its 32-bit and 64-bit Intel machines, which are commonly referred to as X86 servers because of prior Intel processor names (286, 386, and 486). IBM wants to demonstrate that the Opteron machines are different, and this one is just called the eServer 325. In January, IBM outsourced the manufacturing of all of its xSeries excepting its BladeCenter blade servers and xSeries 440/450 "Summit" servers line to contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI of San Jose, California. Sanmina only last week acquired the Opteron server startup called Newisys, which was just getting ready to ship its own Opteron servers. Newisys' CEO was Phil Hester, who was the designer of IBM's RS/6000 Unix product line and the chief technology officer for Big Blue's PC unit for years. The Newisys team includes top people who used to hail from IBM, Dell, Compaq and DEC (now both part of Hewlett-Packard), SGI, Texas Instruments, and others.

Lest you go jumping to conclusions, sources at IBM say that the eServer 325 machine that Big Blue announced is not a repackaged Newisys box, but rather is a modified version of the xSeries 335 server, which has up to two of Intel's 32-bit "Prestonia" Xeon DP processors. IBM sources say that the eServer 325 is very similar to the xSeries 335, and is based on an IBM design. Sanmina is nonetheless the actual manufacturer of the box, not IBM. And even if IBM doesn't like to admit it for whatever political reasons, the new Opteron server runs X86 code and is most definitely an xSeries-style machine.

The eServer 325 comes in a 1U, rack-mounted form factor and comes with two Opteron processors (you can't buy it in a uniprocessor configuration). IBM is supporting the 1.4 GHz Opteron 240, 1.6 GHz Opteron 242, and 2 GHz Opteron 246 processors in the machines. It supports from 512 MB to 12 GB of main memory, has two hard drive bays, and has two PCI-X slots. SCSI disks ranging in capacity from 36 GB to 146 GB are supported in the eServer 325 and slower (yet cheaper) IDE disks in 40 GB to 120 GB capacities are supported as well. The machine has an integrated single channel Ultra320 SCSI RAID 1 controller and a whole slew of IBM RAS components.

The new IBM Opteron server uses the AMD 8111 chipset, and has the auxiliary 8131 HyperTransport bus for PCI-X peripherals. For you skeptics out there, the fact that the eServer 325 uses the AMD chipset proves that this is not a repacked Newisys machine, since Newisys was developing its own chipsets for two-way Hammer servers.

However, IBM may in the future switch to the Newisys two-way and four-way chipsets, which were called "Khepri" and "Sobek" under their code-names. Newisys was also working on a Hammer chipset that scaled from 8 to 32 processors, but what will become of this is unclear. Given that IBM is mostly interested in using Opteron-based servers in HPC applications right now (or so it says publicly), two-way machines are all it really needs to build big Linamd clusters. There may come a day when four-way or larger Opteron machines are needed or wanted. But IBM, having invested a lot in its "Summit" designs for 32-bit Xeon MP and 64-bit Itanium processors is not going to try to rush it. What IBM is trying to do by supporting Opterons is exactly what AMD is trying to do--shoot the gap between 32-bit Xeons and 64-bit Itaniums. AMD reckons it can give nearly the same performance as Itanium on many HPC and commercial workloads, 64-bit memory support, and at a price that is competitive with Xeon servers.

IBM's pricing for the eServer 325 is set to be approximately at a 10 percent premium compared to a similar Xeon DP xSeries machine, according to IBM sources. This is about what you can reckon IBM thinks the value of 64-bits is worth in the X86 world. A base machine with two 1.4 GHz Opterons, 1GB of main memory, and an 80 GB IDE disk drive costs $2,919. It will support 64-bit implementations of Windows or Linux. IBM is selling these machines as well as capacity running in an On Demand scenario from its supercomputing center in Poughkeepsie, New York. IBM will start shipping the eServer 325 immediately to selected customers now, with full availability scheduled for October 17.

The AIST 11 teraflops cluster deal in Japan is IBM's first big deal selling Opteron machines, and IBM believes that the value of the Opteron machines over competing products is well illustrated in the deal. Without providing specifics on unit pricing, IBM sources said that AIST would buy 1,058 eServer 325 servers that would have about 8.5 teraflops of computing power. Ironically, AIST is also buying 260 dual-processor Itanium 2 servers on an OEM basis from Intel as part of the deal; these machines deliver about 2.5 teraflops of computing power. The Itaniums, at least for HPC work, pack a serious wallop. But IBM reckons that an AMD server, chip for chip, can deliver about 80 percent of the performance of an Itanium server at about 25 percent the cost. AIST is installing both kinds of servers so it can test these ideas out for itself. The entire cluster will be running SuSE's Linux Enterprise Server 8 as well as the open source Globus toolkit for grid computing.

The IBM win at AIST comes hot on the heels of another big win for AMD last week, when the Chinese National Center for Intelligent Computing Systems announced a 10 teraflops grid cluster called Red Grid that would be based on 2,192 Opteron processors. Cray also chose AMD and SuSE to build the "Red Storm" 100 teraflops cluster for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three big deals do not make a market, to be sure. But this is a start.