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I suppose this is good for the industry…good for the customer…adds more choice in the market, which is ultimately a good thing.  I’m sure AMD feels a little jilted after helping Sun break in to the x86 market but that’s today’s reality.  The x86 platform is the commodity standard in servers and it’s a two horse race.  If you don’t have a bet on both ponies it’s hard to win the race. Of course, this doesn’t bode well for the RISC chip vendors as they get further and further pushed into the niche.

The bottom line is that it’s no longer about the hardware. Intel and AMD are in a leapfrog game and customers love it, as they can play hardware vendors off against each other and get the lowest pricing as a result. Whoever happens to have the hottest chips at the time of purchase will win. If every hardware vendor supports both AMD and Intel, all the better, as that means there are more vendors to play off each other.

The reality here is that supporting both AMD and Intel are the ante to get in the game. Software is where the real value add is. Companies that just sell inexpensive AMD and Intel servers as their only value have a difficult future.  Taking these commodity components and adding real value on top is where the future lies.