New York, Feb 25: Hewlett-Packard Co. on Tuesday, in a widely expected move, said it will sell server computers that run on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron microprocessors, a cheaper alternative to industry leader Intel Corp.'s Itanium and Xeon chips. HP, based in Palo Alto, California, said that it will start selling a ProLiant branded-server that runs on AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Currently, the majority of servers that HP sells are based on Intel technology.
HP's move to Opteron follows that of its major competitors including International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
However, Dell Inc., No. 2 in the personal computer market behind HP, last week said it had no plans to use AMD's chips because customers were not interested in it.
HP said that its customers had been asking for the chip.
"We never said we'd never do it. It's just that Intel has been able to solve all of our customer needs until now," said Scott Stallard, HP general manager for enterprise storage and servers. Bureau Report