AMD Finishes Off Quad Cores with Budapest Opterons
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Advanced Micro Devices this week has finally finished getting its quad-core Rev F lineup of processors into the field with the delivery of the 'Budapest' Opteron 1300 series of chips for single-socket workstations and servers. The Budapest chips are going to make some server makers, who have built machines based on the 940-pin AM2 socket, very happy and the single-socket boxes are one place where AMD can point to market share gains for its Opteron lineup, despite Intel's two-year onslaught. READ MORE >

U.S. Drags Down Server Sales in Q1, But Weak Dollar Helps
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Depending on how you want to look at it, the United States both helped and hurt sales in the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics compiled by the box counters at IDC. The jittery economy in the United States has caused companies large and small to pull back on server spending, but at the same time the weak dollar compared to currencies in overseas markets that are experiencing decent growth in server sales as their economies build up and are amplifying the revenues as those sales are booked back in the States for the major server players. READ MORE >

Looks Like Unisys Is Reselling Sun's X4600 Opteron Boxes
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Unisys has plenty of experience in creating sophisticated server designs based on myriad chip architectures. What it does not have is a high-volume server business. After taking a run at the high-end Windows server business in 2000 through 2005 with its ES7000 line, the Systems and Technology Group at the company has forged a partnership with NEC to make a new generation of boxes and, in the interim before those machines come to market, is partnering with others to OEM their servers. READ MORE >

Themis Partners with Sun to Make Sparc T2 Blade Server
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Since the launching of the first generation of 'Niagara' Sparc T series of multicore processors nearly three years ago, Sun Microsystems has been very keen on getting other server makers to use the chip or, if they want to, to take the open source specs for the chip and create their own variants. It is an admirable approach to sales and marketing, using the same open source approach on hardware as has been successful for a lot of infrastructure software. But it is debatable if the approach has made Sun any money. READ MORE >