New servers purchased by Google will contain Opteron processors from AMD instead of models from Intel, an analyst firm said.
No one from Google has confirmed the report in the Los Angeles Times on the switch story. Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone told the Times Google buy virtually all of its new hardware with AMD chips instead of ones from Intel.
Shareholders approved the move and nudged AMD up in trading yesterday. The Google boardroom should be an entertaining place to be when the next board meeting takes place. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who has been dealing with an AMD antitrust lawsuit since last June, is a member of Google’s board.
To handle the massive number of search requests and support the numerous products it has released like Gmail and AdWords, Google runs thousands of servers. The article gave that number as over 200,000.
Like any business, Google sometimes needs to swap out a failing machine; the company probably has to increase the number of servers it uses regularly as it releases new products. When Google Analytics debuted, overwhelming demand for that service caused Google to close the open registration for it and use a waiting list to admit new users.
Analytics, a service that combs through website logfiles to determine information about visitors to a site, is a computationally intensive activity. It isn’t known how many users Google has for Analytics. Many of these new AMD purchases may end up supporting additional users of that service.
—
document.write(“Email Murdok here.”)
Drag this 
Add to document.write(“Del.icio.us”) | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
