Chevron adopts Opteron for high-performance computing

AMD's Opteron chip is making gains on the Top500 List of supercomputers. The Opteron accounted for 55 systems on the list released last month, more than double the 25 systems on the list released six months earlier. But Intel Corp. processors are used in 333 systems on the latest list, and 81 of those processors are its 64-bit EM64T chips.

Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said the IBM announcement "helps validate IBM's positioning of Opteron as an ideal solution for HPC applications."

The Top500 List is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Hans Meuer at the University of Mannheim, Germany; and Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.