The Opteron marks AMD's lunge into the enterprise business market. The Athlon MP processors were not considered by many as powerful enough to compete with Intel's Xeon and Itanium2 processors. The question on many of our minds is, "How well does the Opteron stack up to the competition?" Ace's Hardware has a review on current server systems and how each one is fairing.

"Overall, the Opteron is the best server CPU of its class and we doubt very much that the 3.2 Xeon DP with 2 MB L3-cache, coming early next year is going to change that. The Opteron will probably remain the fastest CPU for the server tasks tested here until Intel introduces Nocona, the “Xeon Prescott” at 3.4-3.6 GHz (1 MB L2, 800 MHz FSB) at the end of the 2nd quarter of 2004."

AMD may very well make a big splash in the server market after all. IDC Reports that 10,746 Opteron servers have been shipped in the third quarter, which is great considering how new AMD is to this side of the market.