For AMD this meant they also managed to grab a very popular server in the Seamicro SM10000-XE server. This server is something of a hot item and has now been give the gold thumbs up from Red Hat which means that owners of this nice little product can get full support contracts for their installations of Red Hat Enterprise.

AMD was quick to brag about this as it means that an AMD product has the certification from Red Hat for enterprise use. Unfortunately the server is an Intel Xeon based product. AMD may attempt to ignore this little fact and focus on it being their own server (since Seamicro is not an AMD owned company), but we wonder how far that will get them. Most people that would be purchasing a product like the SM10000-XE will know that specifications, in fact they would be buying the product for the specifications. This is not like the consumer market where people buy based on brand more often than spec.

What AMD needs to do before touting this is get a Seamicro server with Opterons inside certified and then they can claim they have RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) support regardless of your choice of CPU. If they can do this and show a price savings (while not losing too much performance) then they might be able to get more interest.

For now they are in the awkward sport of making money from one of their own products that also makes money for their chief rival Intel… I am sure that the irony of this is not lost on either company.

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