"The market is heading to dual-core which will proliferate, but we haven't seen massive deployments yet," he said. "Intel's Woodcrest is expected to be adopted quite quickly as it is coming to market at a comparable price.

"AMD is challenged by Woodcrest so there will be increased competition between the two and customers will benefit."

Sun Microsystems' Australia and New Zealand Solaris product manager, James Eagleton, said the company gained 7 percent in market share across all markets, which can be attributed to "innovation and sense of vibrancy around Solaris".

"We're seeing a lot of traction around Galaxy now and have launched the Opteron Rev-F capability," Eagleton said. "More blade offerings are coming before the end of the year so we're only part way along our journey into x86."

Eagleton said its Niagara-based Ultrasparc T1 systems are competing well against Intel's Itanium with more than 250 units shipped in the last quarter compared with 142 IA64 units, according to Gartner.