Fujitsu Will Offer Opteron-Based Server

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company—a subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd. —on Tuesday is announcing that it will offer the Primergy BX630 blade server powered by the dual-core Opteron chips starting next month. In December, Fujitsu will roll out the 1U (1.75 inches) Primergy RX220 rack server running on Opteron.

Fujitsu currently runs some products on AMD technology—for example, its LifeBook S2000 notebook is powered by a Turion 64 mobile chip from AMD. However, the new servers mark the first time the systems maker has put an AMD processor in a server, said Richard McCormack, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Fujitsu.

"The benefits of Opteron are performance and power consumption," McCormack said, adding that the company has seen customer demand for the processor ramp over the past year. "The market is moving relatively fast and there is a push to dual-core [technology]."

Dual-core technology— where two processing cores are placed on a single piece of silicon—enable customers to almost double the performance of their systems without a corresponding jump in power consumption or real estate. Common in the RISC space, AMD was the first to the x86 market when it rolled out its first dual-core Opteron.

Rival Intel Corp. earlier this month unveiled the first of its dual-core Xeon processors, dubbed "Paxville." Fujitsu will outfit some of its Primergy systems with Intels dual-core Xeons this month.

The new Opteron-based servers not only grow Fujitsus server portfolio—they also offer the PrimePower servers running on its SPARC64 chips and its PrimeQuest systems powered by Intels Itanium 2 processors—they also enable the OEM to expand deeper into the HPC (high-performance computing space), McCormack said. The chips high performance and low power consumption, combined with the blade servers dense form factor, makes it attractive to HPC workloads, McCormack said.

The BX630 can be installed in Fujitsus current Primergy BX600 chassis and mixed with the Xeon-based BX620 or BX660 blades. In addition, AMDs HyperTransport technology in the Opteron enables customers to link a pair of the two-socket BX630 blades to create a single four-socket system, giving them up to eight processing cores in a single system, McCormack said.

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He declined to say whether Fujitsu would expand its use of Opteron into other servers, saying only that the company will continue evaluating its options.

Pricing for the BX630 will start at $2,350; for the RX220—which comes with the Primergy Management Suite—pricing starts at $1,700.

A spokesman for AMD said adding Fujitsu to the mix of OEMs using Opteron will help the chip maker gain more traction in the enterprise space—especially in the European and Asian markets, where Fujitsu is a larger player—where it is trying to eat away at Intels dominance. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc., along with a host of smaller systems makers, already offer Opteron-based servers. The one major holdout is Dell Inc., which continues to say that it will stick with Intel-only offerings.

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