IBM claims HP and SUN have Opteron advantage

In this ZDNet interview, Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM's systems and technology group, claimed that Opteron systems bring in more revenue per unit. He said HP's gains were not due to high units, but higher unit revenue from Opteron servers, IBM's own Opteron blades also bring in much higher unit revenue than Xeon blades.

"If you look at HP's results over the last few quarters...it wasn't their unit growth that was causing them to improve, it was their average unit revenue, and the average unit was improving because they had more AMD content than they had had previously."

"In our own case, the average unit revenues on an AMD blade are much higher than the same kind of Intel blade because the performance is better. And because the performance is better, people put more I/O (input-output components) and more memory and other things on them."

Since AMD has 22.1% of server unit share but 27% of the revenue share, an Opteron server brings in 30% more revenue than a Xeon server.

It makes sense. If you have a Xeon, adding more I/O cards and memory will choke its front side bus.