Iain Morris, senior vice president of AMD's personal connectivity solutions group, said AMD will support the existing Opteron silicon part numbers for a minimum of five years, and provide design support to customers in the embedded market.

At an ESC press conference Monday (March 7), Sun Microsystems said it will use the Opteron in a line of blades that support the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard. Sun will offer two versions of its next-generation ATCA blades, one based on the Opteron processors and another using Sun's own UltraSparc silicon. The blades will support both Solaris and CG Linux.

Other companies supporting the Opteron embedded move include Broadcom's ServerWorks product line, the Nvidia chip set operation, and LSI Logic's RapidChip prototyping products.

Analysts said the high I/O bandwidth of the on-chip HyperTransport links would give AMD advantages in the storage market, for example.