Whitefields Gone To Grey

So, AMD wants to capture at least a third of the server processor market by three years from now. Or maybe even a half, depending on which company official you're listening to. Well, one point of market share at a time, they may just get there. And that may not be their doing, but rather that of rival Intel. The company announced yesterday that it was revamping its processor roadmap, ditching the 2007 generation of the Xeon MP, named Whitefield, in favor of a new Xeon MP that employs a high-speed interconnect for chip I/O instead of the standard front-side bus.

Long-term, that's a good move in speeding up processor efficiency. But in the short term? One Wall Street analyst told Forbes.com today that the delay that the new systems will open a door for more market share loss for Intel in the big-bucks, four-way-and-higher server space. Since the likely beneficiary of that market share is AMD with Opteron systems that already use a direct interconnect, you can do the math; AMD's recent roll is likely to continue while Intel plays some speed catchup.