An early candidate is IBM's Supercomputing On Demand offering. "Many high-performance computing customers have expressed real interest in this technology," said Mark Shearer, vice president of IBM eServers products.

IBM cited Opteron's clear migration path from X86-based 32- to 64-bit applications as a key reason to adopt the AMD64 platform. The company also said it would make the systems available later this year.

IBM also said it wants to enable its customers to build their own scaled-out clustered systems or provide future access to supercomputer clusters on demand. Under the plan, customers would pay for processing power based on how much capacity they need and for how long they need it.

AMD offered more details Tuesday on the Opteron processor. The 100-million transistor chip is fabricated exclusively by AMD using a 130-nm process technology and occupies a 193 mm² area.

The current AMD64 240 chip, which consumes 89 watts, has a 64-bit virtual address space and a 40-bit physical address space.

AMD president and chief executive Hector Ruiz vowed to make available smaller 90-nm and 65-nm chips later this year. "Only AMD and IBM can fab the SOI-based chip," Ruiz said, leaving open the possibility that IBM might be recruited to manufacture future batches.

Ruiz also said desktop Opterons made in a smaller 150-mm² die will be available later this year.

"We will sell more Opterons in the next four quarters than our competitors have sold (64-bit MPUs) in the last four years," declared Jerry Sanders, AMD founder and board chairman.

Ringing endorsements

AMD received endorsements from about 50 system builders and infrastructure partners during the Opteron launch. Nvidia stressed that Opteron platforms would combine 32-bit desktop office applications with demanding 64-bit CAD applications.

The graphics chip designer said Tuesday it plans to target the workstation market for the Opteron server processor with its nForce3 Pro chip.

Drew Henry, Nvidia's senior director of platform products, said the workstation market segment has long sought a solution like Opteron. "That's an extraordinarily powerful proposition and instantly makes that professional more efficient while leveraging incredible return on investment," Henry said.

AMD and Nvidia have been working together for ten years. Henry said 64-bit workstations based on Opteron could provide the "the computing bandwidth to allow professionals in many industries to create, display and analyze complex data sets and designs."

Nvidia has developed a family of platform processors for use with the Opteron processor as part of its nForce3 professional platform. Workstation-class motherboards and PCs based on nForce3 are expected to be available this summer.