“Now, what I’d like to do is share IBM’s perspective about the impact that AMD’s technology will have on this high performance computing solution space. We are really excited to see Opteron transition from the development phase and into the world of scientific and technical computing. Today, many of our high performance computing customers are increasingly looking for new solutions to build affordable, compute intensive, scale-out clusters. This evolution has created a demand for innovative technologies that ensure the investment protection, and enables our customers to optimize their existing infrastructures while managing their tight IT budgets.

We believe that Opteron provides customers with a natural evolutionary path from today’s industry standard 32-bit environments, empowering them to gracefully migrate their 32-bit systems into the 64-bit world. Now, IBM believes that Opteron offers compelling performance at an affordable price. This is a key benefit for customers that are engaged in demanding application areas like oil exploration and digital rendering that we saw earlier. With its 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility and price performance, we believe Opteron offers a significant innovation that customers have requested for high performance computing applications.

So, why is this innovation so important to IBM? Well, IBM ranks number one in worldwide revenue for high performance computing. According to industry rankings, IBM is also number one in super computing. The comprehensive IBM super computing offerings are utilized in a wide variety of applications, in scientific applications, in business applications. And some of these applications include environmental prediction, nuclear stockpile stewardship, product design from large aircraft to cell phones, medical simulations, genomic research, and drug design. IBM is committed to delivering industry leading solutions that address this broad spectrum of customer demands. Today, we are responding to our customers in this space who have been asking us for an IBM solution based on the type of technology that Opteron represents. This is why IBM has decided to support today’s event, announcing our intention to deliver an Opteron based server platform.

Now, our support for Opteron also reinforces IBM’s commitment to provide customers with the most comprehensive, flexible solutions in the market. Today, we are also announcing that we are going to make Opteron technology available in our super computing on-demand facility. So IBM plans to enable customers to build their own scale-out clustered systems; and will also provide access in the future to huge super computer clusters on demand, where clients pay for the processing power based on how much capacity they need and for how long they need it. We congratulate AMD on this exciting announcement, and we look forward to seeing this technology available.”