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Hammer Slips Again

Hammer Slips Again

AMD's novel 64-bit Hammer chip, also known now as Opteron on which it is betting the farm, has slipped again. There have been signals for a while that March was kinda iffy and Thursday night AMD confirmed that it had "locked down" on April for Opteron's formal introduction. Hopefully that lock won't be picked.

Enter Beachhead, AMD's scheme to scratch the reportedly serious Opteron interest itch until the real stuff arrives.

AMD is going to start selling pre-production Opteron servers to developers in February under a seed program it calls Beachhead. The boxes that go out will be Newisys' (not AMD's Melodies) and will be purchased directed from Newisys' outsourcer Sanmina-SCI, the foundry it shares with IBM.

The 2p Khepri 1Us will carry early Opterons that probably won't be much better than, oh, say, 1.4GHz-1.6GHz, not the 2GHz parts AMD is hoping for at launch. Otherwise - except for maybe some BIOS tweaks - the boxes will be exactly what will get deployed.

Beachhead - and Intel will probably crack "Yeah, the German side of Normandy" - should have 500 machines dedicated to it. Some will be used internally and some earmarked for press reviews. Of course, both AMD and Newisys have been placing alpha and beta units out with developers already - in Newisys' case with brand name end users too like Goodyear, Fidelity and the national labs. Newisys is trying to ignite desire so IBM, HP, Dell, NEC and Fujitsu Siemens OEM its box. Nothing beats getting in their customers' panties.

As an added incentive, Newisys is scheduled to turn up at LinuxWorld in New York in a few days with a clutch of signed VARs and systems builders in tow including Angstrom Microsystems, RackSaver, California Digital, M&A; Technologies, Einux, Appro, Microway and Colfax International.

The messaging here seems to be the Khepris are coming and the channels are falling into place.

Meanwhile, AMD is utterly vague on when Opteron's desktop sister chip, the Athlon 64, will get here.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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