<font size="2"><span class="content"> <p>Accounting for up to 56% of market share in the US and 40% worldwide, <strong>the quad-socket market is the last stronghold of AMD.</strong> It is a small stronghold, as for every 4S server, there about 17 dual-socket and four single-socket servers sold. However, since each 4S server contains four CPUs, the 4S server market accounts for about 10% of the server CPUs sold. More importantly, the margins are quite a bit higher than in the popular 2S market, and as a result those 10% of server CPU shipments are good for 20% of the revenue, and it gets even better.</p> <p>IDC expects that in 2008 the 4S market will grow up to 14%, more than twice the growth of the dual-socket server market^[1]. GCC reports that about 57% of 297 enterprises reported that they are going to buy quad-socket servers, and no less than 31% indicated that they were going to buy more quad-socket systems than in the past. Only 15.5% said they would buy less of these systems^[2]. This trend is relatively easy to explain: IDC studies indicate that the number of x86 servers bought for the purpose of virtualization will show a Compound Annual Growing Rate of 40-45% until 2010^[3]. Although IDC's studies have been overoptimistic before, we think it's safe to conclude that the 4S x86 market has a bright future ahead.</p> <p>It is no surprise that AMD and Intel have started a bitter fight for this profitable market. The hostilities started to heat up in early Q3 of 2007. AMD introduced <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3057" target="_blank">a 3GHz (95W) Opteron 8222 and 3.2GHz (120W) Opteron 8224</a> that outpaced Intel's Xeon MP &quot;Tulsa&quot; by a wide margin. Just a few weeks later, the most impressive Xeon MP launch we have seen in years became a reality: the Caneland platform with the Intel Xeon &quot;Tigerton MP&quot; was born. The new Intel 7300 chipset offered no less than four independent FSB, twice as many as <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2872&amp;p=2" target="_blank">the previous quad-socket platform</a>, but the most important improvement was the CPU: the old Xeon 71xx CPU had two NetBurst based cores; the new Xeon 73xx was a quad-core CPU, based on Intel's 65nm Core architecture.</p> <p>At <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2897&amp;p=11" target="_blank">the end of our review of the quad-core Xeon DP &quot;Clovertown</a>&quot;, we called attention to an Intel CPU labeled as &quot;Clovertown MP&quot;. That is exactly what the current quad-core Intel is, a Xeon MP version of the Xeon &quot;Clovertown&quot; 53xx DP. Originally, the &quot;Clovertown MP&quot; was probably a backup plan of Intel's Whitefield processor, a quad-core CPU with a massive shared L2 cache. As Whitefield failed to materialize, plan B went into action. The Clovertown MP was renamed to &quot;Tigerton&quot;, or a 65nm quad-core Xeon MP that is based on two dual-core &quot;Core&quot; chips.</p> <p>Intel conquered the dual and single socket server markets as you can see in the graphic below. Its &quot;Core&quot; based Xeons have been gaining ground quickly for almost two years now. The sharp increase in market share since the introduction of the dual-core &quot;Core&quot; architecture (&quot;Woodcrest&quot; May 2006) and quad-core (November 2006) is remarkable. A more recent report of mercury research claims that <a href="http://www.edn.com/article/CA6553931.html" target="_blank">Intel Server CPU unit share is still about 87</a>% which is a crushing superiority in market share.</p> </span><span class="content"> <p>The introduction of quad-core Xeon MP should not have been a big problem for AMD, as it launched <a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091" target="_blank">the &quot;native&quot; quad-core Opteron</a> 83xx series a few weeks after the appearance of the Intel's Xeon MP. Unfortunately for AMD, <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3260&amp;p=2" target="_blank">the TLB bug</a> threw a fly into the soup. While this bug is irrelevant for the desktop market, erratum 298 is not acceptable in the quad-socket market. On a virtualized server there is a small chance - compared to the infinitesimal small chance in desktop use - that the bug could rear its ugly head.</p> <p>That allowed Intel's Tigerton to besiege the last AMD stronghold for more than 7 months. The only thing AMD could do is lower the prices of their server CPUs. AMD managed to keep the market share loss to a minimum but the average selling price of an AMD server chip fell from a little less than $400 (Q2 2007) to less than $300 at the end of 2007. Something had to be done, or the Intel engineers would get bored without a decent challenge&hellip;.<br /> </p> <p><a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3335">Read more...</a><br /> </p> </span></font><span class="content"> <p> </p> <p><br /> </p> </span>