AMD lijkt nu ook succes te krijgen in de workstation markt. Niet alleen is er een samenwerkingsverband met 3DLabs, Athlon processors worden inmiddels ook gebruikt in high-end workstations van Pionex Elite. Geen lullige config zoals het Athlon systeem van Athlon, maar een serieuze machine waar de 3D Modellende tweaker trots op kan zijn: een 800MHz Athlon met 512Meg ECC SDRAM, 18Gb 10.000rpm SCSI LVD drive en 3DLabs Oxygen GVX1 videokaart. The Register heeft een nieuwsartikel over deze ontwikkelingen:
A release from AMD said that US manufacturer Pionex will use the 800MHz Athlon in a range of commercial desktops and workstations it is selling.At the same time, 3D Labs said it was optimising its drivers for the Athlon platform. The Pionex systems use the Oxygen GVXI graphics boards, themselves based on 3D technology.
The background to this push is interesting. When we visited AMD's Dresden fab last year, AMD European marketing director Robert Stead made it clear to us that his company's strategy was to position its processors to challenge Intel at every level, including the workstation and server market.
[...] Most of the running since early August has been with the gaming sites, most of which have enthusiastically endorsed the Athlon as their choice for running the fun stuff.
That's been aided by clever marketing from AMD, which has quite cheerfully exploited the game and hardware sites' views. But AMD is a corporation, has shareholders, and has bigger ambitions than just the game market, which its marketeers have leveraged. The Pionex announcement is, we anticipate, the first of many such wins in the workstation/commercial arena.
And in the lucrative workstation end of the x86 market, Intel has had it all of its own way to date.
