AMD has finally done it. After over a year of what the company PR-speak designates as product "evangelizing," AMD announced the commercial debut of its 64 bit Opteron processor for the server market in New York today.

For more than a year, AMD has espoused Opteron's backward capability with 32 bit programs and how Intel's recently launched 64 bit Itanium server processor is not backward incompatible. Or how the processor's HyperTransport and integrated memory module factor into the performance equation. Or why server farms require 64 bit computations for advanced number crunching.

So at Opteron's launch this week, is there anything left to say? AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz thinks so. At the press launch event in New York where AMD splurged on hors d'oeuvres and lox, Ruiz said that the Opteron announcement was the most important event in AMD's history. "When we introduced the 32 bit Athlon or other products, we were participating in the Intel economy," Ruiz told THG.

"We are now creating the AMD economy."

But in addition to AMD's self-aggrandizing today, the company offered evidence against naysayers who claimed that the company will never make significant inroads into the notoriously conservative enterprise market, and that it still had to get major software developers and OS suppliers to jump onboard. So in a sense, AMD hit a homerun today: IBM served as the first major server OEM to announce its adoption of Opteron; Via announced its dual processor Opteron chipset for 128 bit computing, and RedHat, Suse, and Microsoft all were on stage together in New York to announce their Opteron support.

AMD's High Hopes

After Intel launched its 64 bit Itanium last year and subsequently gained and then lost a top-tier server design win from Dell, AMD's growing marketing budget has been put to use. The company has devoted considerable time communicating its claims about what the Opteron will do to the press and analyst community while offering device samples to the likes of HP and even Dell who AMD says are evaluating Opteron server systems.

AMD hopes to gain some ground against Intel, who has been using its deep pockets to trounce AMD on the desktop processor pricing front while taking away market share in the enterprise sector, a sector in which AMD has never made significant inroads. By attempting to beat Intel on performance and portability, AMD hopes to make a lot of money by selling to the enterprise, high-performance server market.