The worsening economic climate has led many computer buyers to become much more risk averse in their buying decisions, according to system builders.

Corporate buyers are sticking as much as possible to known systems to avoid having to try new technological approaches that may fail.

The resulting decisions are most likely to centre on using existing expertise rather than investing in unknown systems.

"Risk aversion is key to the buying decision," George Reitz, vice president of sales at Rackable Systems, told vnunet.com.

"Buying criteria have changed from the past when it was pure price-to-performance. Now everyone looks at the risk aversion angle."

Chip maker AMD is hoping that this attitude will make its forthcoming Shanghai processor much more attractive to buyers and system builders.

The 45nm chip can be swapped with existing Barcelona server processors with nothing more than a BIOS change, according to the firm.

"The elephant in the room at the moment is the economy," Burke Banda, US marketing manager for servers and workstations at AMD, told vnunet.com.

"It is one of the most telling pieces of feedback we are getting on infrastructure. It is a time for them to be risk averse by sticking to technology they are familiar with."

System builders have also said that retaining socket compatibility is helping them maintain control over inventory.

Philip Pokorny, chief architect at Linux high performance computing system builder Penguin Computing, told vnunet.com that he is very positive about the new AMD chip.

"I have a stock of motherboards that I have been using for Barcelona," he said. "I can make those motherboards Shanghai-capable very easily and continue shipping them."