Intel's delay of its Romley server platform to the first week of March 2012 has been caused by problems with SAS storage after pairing Sandy Bridge-EP processors with C600 chipsets, according to sources from Taiwan-based server supply chain makers.
Although the problems are gradually being resolved, as the market has been sluggish and enterprises have almost used up their 2011 IT budgets, Intel internally believes that a delay will not significantly influence the server industry, the sources said.
Intel will launch Xeon E5-2600 and E5-1600 series processors to pair with C600 chipsets in the first quarter of 2012 and will launch the Carlow platform that features Ivy Bridge-E2 (E3-1200) series CPUs, paired with the C216 chipset, at a later time.
Meanwhile, AMD, which currently has about 5% share in the global server CPU market, has recently announced its latest 16-core Opteron 6200 and 4200 series processors that have already been adopted by players including Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM and Dell, in their servers.
As for 2012, AMD will add the Opteron 3000 server platform to its server product line, targeting web hosting, web servers and micro-server markets, for with Zurich-based 4- to 8-core processors are ready to ship in the first half of 2012.
Intel server systems
Photo: Monica Chen, Digitimes file photo
Article translated by Joseph Tsai
