AMD winning commercial market share

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. started 2005 well and is on the road to achieving its goal of a 20 percent slice of the server market this year, a senior executive said Wednesday.

The company wants to grab one-fifth of the server market and at least 15 percent of the commercial client business in 2006, said Marty Seyer, corporate vice president and head of AMD's commercial business and performance computing unit, at a Tokyo news conference. AMD trails rival Intel Corp. in the computer processor market.

"That strategy is serving us well," he said. "We have achieved greater than 20 percent market share as of the end of Q1 in servers, allowing us to leverage that success into the traditional client space."

Servers based on AMD's processors accounted for more than US$1 billion of server revenue in the first quarter, according to an estimate released Wednesday by IDC. That's the first time that AMD-based servers have broken into the billion dollar revenue range, according to the market research company.

IDC said it believes the lower heat dissipation of AMD-based systems was proving popular with IT managers wrestling with higher energy bills.

Looking ahead, Seyer said he believes AMD will lead the industry with quad-core performance per watt in 2007 and be the number one provider of new clients in 2009.

Seyer was in Tokyo for the local launch of AMD's new AM2 CPU socket, which allows fast DDR2 memory to be paired with Athlon desktop processors. The company announced two new processors: the 2.8-GHz Athlon 64 FX-62 and 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+.

Initial benchmark tests of the processors by PC World showed little performance gain from the new socket but the potential for more notable performance gains in the future.