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'It was critical for us to have a customer the calibre of IBM to adopt our technology that is aimed at the enterprise and servers,' says Ruiz, who was talking exclusively to our sister publication IT PRO.

He was speaking in a week in which IBM announced a new line up of five enterprise-class servers, which will all be powered by AMD's Opteron chips. AMD already supplies microchips to Sun Microsystems for its x86 servers, to HP and has even persuaded Intel die-hard Dell to develop Opteron-powered servers.

'The [blade] configuration is much more demanding from a power efficiency point of view,' says Ruiz. 'Our approach is that we have to design for the most demanding environments, so we have to be as efficient as we can in terms of power per watt.'
IBM was also attracted to Opteron, though, because of its backwards compatibility

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with 32-bit, x86 applications.

The new servers will be based around the Opteron Ref F, with part of the attraction for IBM being the Opteron's suitability for 32-bit as well as 64-bit x86 applications.

'The industry now seems to be looking for the best solutions for different segments,' says Ruiz.

This all fits in with AMD's strategic $5.4bn acquisition of ATI. Company executives emphasised that the thinking behind the deal was the flexible provision of innovative new computing platforms. The long-term goal is to integrate GPU and CPU cores on a single die, but there will also be a particular focus on business and mobile computing.

'At the entry level, people want basic computing for the small office or the home. That can be a $500 computer,' says Ruiz. 'But a gaming person will want a different platform. This industry tends to go for commoditisation, fragmentation, de-commoditisation and then commoditisation again. Gaming was a niche, but it is now a market that is growing rapidly.'

'Everything we do is driven by standards,' he says. 'Even as we move towards architectures that are multi-core and heterogeneous, the technology still has to follow some standard rules.'

You can read the full interview with Hector Ruiz on IT PRO.