The AMD Opteron™ processor with Direct Connect Architecture powers the world's highest performing 2-way and 4-way servers, making it the ideal choice for enabling enterprise Web and application serving.

Welcome to AMD Opteron™ Solutions, an e-newsletter designed to offer you valuable information on current products, partnerships, promotions and much more from AMD and third parties† that may help you make well-informed purchasing decisions.

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Check out this month's featured Articles and Reviews in the left-hand column of this publication to see what industry analysts, technology publications and other online resources have to say about AMD and the
AMD Opteron processor.

New in 2005: Optimized Power Management Available with AMD Opteron Processors
How long have you been waiting for server and workstation systems coupled with the benefits of optimized platform power consumption? And for systems that are enabled to run at optimum performance and power levels thus reducing electricity costs while maximizing your IT budget dollars by dynamically adjusting performance based on CPU utilization?

We know how important addressing these requirements is to your business and are pleased to let you know the AMD Opteron processor family will include AMD PowerNow! technology with Optimized Power Management (OPM) in the first half of 2005.
AMD PowerNow! technology with OPM for the AMD Opteron processor can decrease overall power consumption for enterprise IT and workstation customers by optimizing performance-on-demand.

Since its introduction nearly four years ago, AMD PowerNow! technology has been widely embraced by AMD’s mobile customers. In the first half of 2005, leading server and workstation OEMs currently offering AMD Opteron processor-based platforms plan to support this latest enhancement to the industry’s first 32- and 64-bit x86 processor.

“Power efficiency is one of a set of emerging components that is redefining the total cost of ownership for datacenter solutions,” said Paul Miller, vice president of marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP.
“AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant servers coupled with the power management advantages of AMD PowerNow! technology will enable our customers to manage their datacenters, offering the greatest rack density, while at the same time reducing IT operating costs. That combination is tough to beat.”

The addition of AMD's innovative AMD PowerNow! technology with OPM strengthens the industry-leading performance-per-watt capabilities of the AMD Opteron processor. Not only does
AMD PowerNow! technology with OPM provide enhanced power management capabilities, it can also aid in platform investment protection for today's demanding enterprise server environments by providing less strain on datacenter cooling and ventilation systems.

“IBM is committed to optimizing the datacenter environment and IBM PowerExecutive and Calibrated Vectored Cooling technologies already bring distinct advantages to our customers,” said Alex Yost, director, IBM eServer Product Management. “AMD PowerNow! technology adds to these solutions to help ensure the performance-per-watt efficiencies, and expands our choice of the best data center solutions for our customers.”

“Our joint customers expect us to deliver on the promise of innovation throughout the datacenter—from OS-level innovation in Solaris 10 to processor-level innovation like AMD PowerNow! technology,” said John Fowler, executive vice president at Sun Microsystems. “This additional technology from AMD will give our Sun Fire servers and Sun Java Workstations based on the AMD Opteron processor even better performance-per-watt capabilities, which is directly in line with Sun's goal of simplifying the datacenter.”

Learn more about how the addition of AMD PowerNow! technology with OPM will further enhance the AMD Opteron processor as the ideal choice for your datacenters>>>

At Your Fingertips: Resources to Enable AMD64-based Enterprise Solutions
Do you want to learn more about how AMD Opteron processor-based solutions are solving critical business issues for organizations like Microsoft Treasury and the world's largest computerized airline reservation system, Sabre Holdings? Are you looking for consolidated information on AMD's industry-leading hardware partners; HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems? Would you like at-a-glance access to software solutions from hundreds of developers that support AMD64 technology on the industry leading operating systems?

In our continued commitment to address the needs of the Enterprise market, a new online resource is now available for you. AMD's Enterprise online presence includes current information related to Enterprise computing solutions, technology innovations, competitive comparisons, benchmarks and system solutions such as server virtualization, Web and application serving and intensive high-performance clusters.

Visit www.amd.com/enterprise regularly to learn more about how AMD64 technology can help enhance your business>>>

Gearing Up for LinuxWorld Conference & Expo
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo is the world's leading and most comprehensive event focusing on Linux and Open Source solutions. LinuxWorld Conference & Expo is the best environment to discover, evaluate, learn, network and experience Linux/Open Source products and services first hand.

Please visit AMD in booth #601, February 14 – 17 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA as we communicate our commitment to Linux markets with products ranging from embedded solutions, workstations, Web-serving solutions to high-performance server clustering solutions. AMD will demonstrate the growing infrastructure of hardware and software being built around the powerful AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon™ 64 processors. We will also be highlighting several new solutions - so be sure to stop by the booth to check them out!

Learn more about LinuxWorld Conference & Expo>>>

HP’s ProLiant DL585 Server Using AMD Opteron Processors Delivers Industry-Leading Performance for Enterprise Applications
Recently submitted industry-standard benchmarks show the HP ProLiant DL585 Server based on AMD Opteron processors delivers leading performance for enterprise-class workloads such as database, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and messaging and collaboration (email).

TPC-C is an online transaction processing benchmark that simulates an enterprise computing environment where users record transactions against a database. These transactions include entering and delivering orders, recording payments, checking the status of orders, and monitoring the level of stock at the warehouses. The benchmark represents any industry that must manage, sell, or distribute a product or service. HP's ProLiant DL585 server with four AMD Opteron processors Model 850 outperforms the nearest Windows®-based competitor (4P Itanium 2 1.5GHz) by 2%, but at a cost per transaction of only $2.94 versus $4.49 for Itanium (53% higher cost). The HP ProLiant DL585 also outperforms the nearest Xeon MP competition (4P Xeon MP 3.0GHz) by 20% at a 16% lower cost per transaction¹.

SAP R/3 is the world's leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and is used by more Fortune 500 companies (like AMD) than any other ERP solution to run their business.

Based on the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark, AMD Opteron processor Model 850 is the world's highest performing processor for 4P Servers running SAP with Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition OS, outperforming all comparable solutions based on Intel processors. Additionally, these results demonstrate the benefits of 64-bit computing on memory intensive applications with 64-bit Microsoft Windows outperforming 32-bit Microsoft Windows by 19% on this benchmark.

Lastly, AMD Opteron processors Model 850 achieve industry-leading performance on MMB3, the Microsoft-developed benchmark for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 performance. These results show that AMD Opteron processor-based 4P servers are able to support more Microsoft Exchange 2003 users than similar servers based on Xeon MP 3.0GHz processors.

See for yourself how the world’s highest performing 2P and 4P servers based on the AMD Opteron processor can benefit your business>>>

32- & 64-bit Software Applications: Find Solutions to Meet Your Business Needs
To help ring in 2005, we have updated the AMD64 Ecosystem to reflect the growing support of the software world for AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 processors and now list over 1000 software packages from over 300 developers. Here are some of the noteworthy updates and additions ringing in the New Year:

• Solaris 10 operating system is now available, offering AMD64 users the ability to run the innovative new release of the industrial-grade UNIX environment for x86 systems. The AMD64 Ecosystem also lists numerous 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris-based development tools and applications from Sun and other ISVs.
  
• A more comprehensive choice of information and communications software components are now listed in the “Infrastructure Software” section, including products from major providers of system, cluster, and storage management software, such as EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun, and Veritas.
  
• A growing number of 64-bit Linux applications, including IBM DB2, Ingres, MYSQL, Oracle 10g, and PostgreSQL database engines; open source infrastructure software such as the Apache web server, JBOSS applications server, and file and print services such as NFS, Samba, and CUPS; and a wealth of EDA, CAE, life sciences, and geophysical software listed in the “Scientific and Engineering” section.
• Looking forward to the Windows x64 release in the first half of 2005, a number of 64-bit Windows-based applications offer beta software, including MS SQL 2005 and Oracle 10g database engines; infrastructure software from Microsoft such as MS IIS and MS Terminal Server; and 3D design and graphics software including Pro/Engineer CAD software and LightWave 3D imaging software.

We look forward to continued work during 2005 with commercial software developers, the Open Source Community and in-house corporate developers to expand this rich ecosystem of software solutions to feature even more applications to support of your business needs.

Access the AMD64 Ecosystem online to find the most up-to-date listing of 32- & 64-bit software apps that support AMD64 technology>>>

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