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Dell May Try AMD Chips For Some Servers
LarsWestergren writes "According to InfoWorld, Dell may be close to adopting AMD processors. Don't get your hopes up too early though. It is mainly for servers (and possibly "gaming"?) since AMD doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell with enough processors for the desktop. Furthermore, Dell have said similar things before, possibly to put pressure on Intel and get better deals from them. Still, this is definitely a PR win for AMD." Intel, though, has a lot more ad dollars to contribute.
Allways been a soft security. Wonder if they'll make $$$
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Maybe now I can finnaly get an Athlon 64 laptop with a Radeon 9800 Pro!
They can either switch to AMD and get better processors, or threaten to switch and negotiate a better deal with Intel -- either way, Dell wins and Intel loses.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Microsoft is supporting the AMD 64 extensions. Dell probably wants to be on the MS rather than Intel side of things since there is no (real) alternative to Windows.
Anyway, this is server-side only. CEO Rollins says, "If we basically sucked up all of AMD's [manufacturing] capacity it would not be enough. They don't have enough capacity for us to use them on the desktop. For us, fundamentally, AMD is much more interesting in the server, workstation or gaming arenas."
The AMD 64 chips also seem to run cooler. This would be majorly helpful, one thinks, then the high clockspeed Intels in a server farm situation. And the 64 bit allows more RAM to be addressed. Yep. Server.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I misread it as Devil may try AMD. Though, I am sleepy. Though, I know a lot of people who would agree that Dell == Devil.
Unforuntately, Dell is in bed too long with Intel for them to add AMD to their productline. Not to mention, the corporations still count server performance by numbers marketing numbers like GHZ and AMD's processor power ratings maybe too low to be advertised correctly.
...don't look now, but your sig is obsolete!
AMD ofice has a grave in the front lawn saying Intel Inside . Looks like finally its gonna come true
I don't know if it's any indicator, but Intel and AMD are within $3 USD of each other.
I bought AMD long long ago and they split. I'm really glad I went that route!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Not that I'm fond of them as a company or anything, but my employer buys thousands of HP's servers, and HP has been selling Opteron-based servers (e.g.) for some while now. Even if AMD never achieved sufficient penetration with ia32, there's some hope that they'll gain some of the ephermeral credibility by being first to market with a workable ia32-compatible 64-bit architecture.
Why don't they try using AMD processors? Maybe for lower-cost Macs.
. . . AMD's stock jumped so crazy today!
Dell makes cheap PC's Just In Time and throws money at advertising. Dell will it's mostly computer illiterate swarms it's just as fast as the Intel equivilant and maybe promote AMD over Intel if it can make a few more dollars.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Don't get your hopes up too early though.
Ok, I won't.
Uhhh, why on earth would I care one way or the either? Why would my hopes be raised?
If amd really needed to produce more chips the only thing they need to do is license their athlon 64 chip design to tsmc or umc like they did with charter. Also IBM is capable of making athlon 64 chips since they did help them with the design so they can ask them to fab chips for them as well. If dell needed that many athlon 64 chips I think amd can provide with some help and share their profits with those who make their chips.
From this article:
,unless AMD bought the famed gravestone and has decided to sport it at their offices now (and I found no evidence to suggest this) the parent might be mistaken.
The former Cyrix site in Richardson, Texas... we visited the site and met ebullient Jerry Rogers, the ex-CEO, who... proudly showed us round the property, which sported a mock gravestone marked "Intel Inside RIP" in the reception area....
So
Also from the article: Cyrix, of course, was acquired by Via... who, it seems, faced some challenges netween their engineering and their business sectors after the acquisition. But, then again, when have these sorts of differences ever been news?
Of blankness, I know nothing.
I'd hope this would bolster their ability to supply the larger OEMs.
Whether Dell is using Intel or AMD x86 CPUs is not that interesting for Dell buyers. Intel and AMD are very close in performance and price/performance. I would never buy Dell though, HP makes in my mind the most reliable PC servers.
The problem is that customers, even if it's a small minority, are starting to switch. Regardless of Dell's marketing practices.
Intel won't have an answer for Opterons until 2006 or so. Until then, I think Dell just expects them to eat the loss.
As a backup, they probably are willing to start selling Opterons. I don't think they'll lose the special pricing deal with Intel if they do that, simply because there's no one else to buy the chips if Dell doesn't want them. Even if the desktop systems were partially switched, it would hugely benefit AMD and wouldn't affect Dell, but would hurt Intel badly.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
A company the size of dell has the capacity to chop and change suppliers quite easily, just look at the harddrives the servers come with. Not one of the arrays we have ordered from dell have the same manufacturer for all the drives.
Not to mention, the corporations still count server performance by numbers marketing numbers like GHZ and AMD's processor power ratings maybe too low to be advertised correctly.Hmm... ok where is your study into this? I order all my "corporations" data base servers from dell and not once did the "marketing" numbers come into it. Plus dell never tried to push them on us either. Most admins i know never go on the marketing numbers because the know that if the server doesn't perform as expected when it arrives it is there ass on the line.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Given the new attitude at Dell, perhaps it now wants to support AMD because AMD is simply more American than Intel. Intel hires a much larger number of foreign workers than AMD. Of course, Intel is also a slave galley, just like most Chinese companies. In fact, many bosses at Intel are Chinese.
Brutality and cruelty are a Chinese way of life.
Yes signed with with Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing
Help fight continental drift.
MOD PARENT DOWN!
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
But of course, you cannot overclock most of them easily, ergo they are terribly low-quality parts, or as you put it, the "shittyest mobos possible."
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I remember seeing a speech by Andy Grove about Intel's business model. Basically that intel puts huge investment and thus huge risk into each new processor version and that failure was not an option as it would destroy the companies ability to continue innovating.
Well, here we are today with this story about Dell, and then there's the story about Microsoft not supporting Itanium, and then theres the news that Intel stopped development on the 4ghz processors (essentially admitting failure of their technology model). The real nail in the coffin is that AMDs processors are not only cheaper, but they are faster and run cooler.
In the bigger picture, this is the next step in the commodization of computers. This process is making them cheap as toilet paper, but it is also a harbinger of end of rapid innovation and perhaps even the end of moores law. This should be expected as its the natural progression of any product.
Once Intel in marginalized, Microsoft must be soon to follow?
Actually I am a Network Engineer for a large multi-hospital system. I can tell you with over 1000 servers in our farm... MHZ is NOT the issue for servers.. 1. Is it reliable? 2. Does it have support for failover/hotswap 3. Does it run the software. 4. Does it meat budget requirements for the system and project? Those are the questions asked - if you knew anything about the real server marked you would understand that servers are typically several generations behind the latest and greatest. We still have servers in production that are P2 400 Mhz machines (dual processor) that run major medical systems that support over 400 users - these systems require 24/7 uptime and typically run at 99.96 % uptime (this is with windows NT 4.0) Don't even ask about the unix systems... IBM hardware that is ancient that supports over 1000 users - talking about 66mhz procs and such. MHZ is definatly not what we look at.
How long is it before Intel becomes the underdog and /. starts cheering for them again?
i hotdog.
Dell uses Intel motherboards. Intel motherboards are among the most reliable and trusted by experienced IT folks and, along with Intel chipsets, are the reason that many people stick with Intel even when AMD's processors are faster, better designed, lower temperature, and cheaper.
The Dell sitting in front of me uses some propriety Dell board of some sort. True, it's got an Intel chipset, and it is stable. However, its slow as hell, has no AGP slot, a non-standard power connector, and suffers from terrible layout.
However, it's one of their "small business PCs", which basically means it was a home system with different software installed (now its got Linux installed). Maybe their corporate PCs/servers use off-the-shelf Intel parts, but their home computers do not.
Dell is well known for it's strategy. It's such a big fish that none of it's suppliers can afford to lose them, including Intel.
So Dell snugs up with 'the competition', making sure the news leaks that they are 'real serious' about switching suppliers.
Then they go back to their current supplier, telling them about their 'intentions'. Unless of course they get a better deal. Which they then get.
Dell isn't going to take AMD.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
We have switched completely to Opteron for our gruntier servers now, and it seems good. Certainly the em64t processors don't rate in comparison.
Unfortunately for Dell this has meant that they only got orders for the low-end gear from us for the last 12 months, so their failure has forced us to experience some of their opposition...
If we all go out and buy a couple shares of AMD stock (less than 30 dollars at the moment!!), they'll (AMD that is) have more revenue to work with when it comes to either manufacturing more processors (for Dell) or broadening their advertising. On a side note, I don't know if anyone reads Linux Journal, or Linux Magazine (the US versions) but AMD had an advertising campaign aimed scientists and researchers, and I would imagine that means educational institutions as well. Is anyone else thinking maybe AMD should stick to this niche? To me it sort of guarantees a higher quality product (for scientists) at a lower price (for ed. institutions).
how is it two companies that make functionally identical products (nevermind the performance) can have such wildly different caps? Can someone clue me in?
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to ramp up production like that out of fear of Dell pullin' a Walmart. i.e.
1. go to a smallish company.
2. buy enough product to double or triple production.
3. Watch the company go into massive debt as they struggle to keep up.
4. Threaten to stop buying before all that debt's taken care of and leverage that into a great deal.
5. As the saying goes, Profit!
Walmart destroyed quite a few companies before people wised up, and there's probably still a few small fry that'll get burned.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"...a non-standard power connector..."
From the "Should I research the pinouts or enjoy the blue smoke" category:
Can some enlighten me on whether this "non-standard" is "standard" on Dell systems? I seem to recall there was much fuss made about this years ago and was under the impression they saw the light and switched back.
...we ALWAYS support the underdog. As soon as the underdog becomes successful, we start bashing them.
e.g. we supported nVidia right up until 3dfx went out of business. Now ATI is the favourite.
It's my opinion that supporting the underdog is an effective litmus test for leftist tendancies.
(For the record, I voted Kerry and am making an observation)
Despite what most have posted, Intel is going to win out of this.
Dell queries AMD and AMD replies, while Dell secretly hopes that Intel is going to jump on this and lower their prices for CPU's, so that Dell can sell the PC's at the same price, but get more profit out of them.
So Dell should be the winner, right?
Well, no...
Since Intel sees what Dell is up to, it plays the game and acts like it's totally ignorant. It gives new features and lower prices for the CPU's, but therefore it's going to need Intel chipsets and motherboards...
You can see what this is going to cause?
Chipset and Intel motherboard prices will rise and I'm not sure Intel is going to lower their CPU prices that much either.
It's simply enough for them to advertise "Now, Intel CPU's got better, faster and cheaper".
But when the whole media campaign is over, Intel has revenue from it's motherboard and chipsets, while raising the CPU price again.
Who is losing now???
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Dell have a problem in the HPC/multi-processor server market. The latest generation of Xeons, the EM64T 64bit capable x86 class processors can only currently go 2 way as Intel don't actually produce a 4 way chipset for these processors yet. Not only this but because the EM64T processors share a memory bus they soon run out of bandwidth.
This is a real problem for Dell as they can't produce machines with large, flat memory architectures with more than 2 processors, and even then the HPC (High Performance Computing) crowd are just laughing that their machines because of the price and memory bottleneck.
Dell are now seeing large cluster purchases abandoning them for other companies who can supply fat nodes which 16-32GB of RAM and 4 processors which have copious amounts of memory bandwidth 'cos of the cunning way AMD built the Opterons.
This is why, I believe, Dell are looking at adding AMD to their line. It may also be a cynical move to get Intel to do something but in the cluster space Intel's processors produce too much heat and just can't do 4 way+big memory and Dell are hurting.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
ummm, just what is the meat budget requirements for hospitals these days? I always thought that hospital food never contained any real meat, just fake stuff to fool you on Thanksgiving like tofurkey....
I highly doubt that Dell will start using any AMD chips for a while yet. Why? Because Dell is by far the largest Intel customer, and they get (and deserve) the best pricing for Intel chips. Plus, they receive large subsidies for advertising Intel only product lines.
Selling any AMD chips would threaten their pricing arrangements with Intel. Since Dell sells billions of dollars of CPUs per quarter, even a half a percent rise in Intel chip prices amounts to 10's of millions of dollars in CPU costs per year. Nevermind product development costs, inventory, and training costs.
Dell has to sell many thousands of ADDITIONAL units just to break even on adding AMD to it's roster.
That said, it's too late for me to try and run the math... maybe the numbers do make sense.
If you make chairs, and I make chairs, but you make 10x as many of them, your company is bigger. :D
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
- AMD doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell with enough processors for the desktop.
This *kinda* goes hand-in-hand with my earlier rejected story I tried to submit:theinquirer.net 1st reported that AMD in a bold move " has signed a deal with Chartered Semiconductor - a Singapore foundry - to make 64-bit processors under licence". Then contituned to elaborate on the story, that " AMD move to Chartered is insurance policy ", where they take help from Nathan Brookwood (senior chip analyst at Insight64.com) totry to make sense of the move.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Dude! You're getting a Dell!
Am I the only one who cringes everytime he hears the word "Intel" in an ad, because you just know that their stupid jingle will follow? After years of being subjected to dah-dah-DAH-dah in just about every single ad for a laptop or a computer on TV, this is reason enough to buy AMD.
Dear Intel ad people, there is such a thing as overdoing things. Why don't you quit the "repeats are everything" theory and switch to the "let's be cool and funny" version? Works for Apple anytime.
Until then, I'm saving for my dual Opteron system. You can take your dah-dah-DAH-dah and...
First, Intel motherboards are actually made by Foxconn (Hon Hai), ASUS, FIC or some third Taiwanese company. Second, those same Taiwanese companies make not only motherboards, but complete systems for Dell, HP, or any other major player -- including Apple.
For example, see this few articles:
Foxconn re-brands PCs for integrators
Dell gets Hon Hai to make two million PCs
Hon Hai takes aim at Compaq, HP
Quanta, Hon Hai win Imac contract
If you don't trust TheInq, much better source is Digitimes, but their archives are subscribers-only.
This is also an effective strategy for Intel since so many people still believe clockspeed is the only factor in performance. People always attack AMD for switching to their somewhat vague performance rating system, and my response is: Can you really blame AMD for that? Intel has done so much work to convince the public that only clockspeed matters, AMD simply can't try to sell their lower clocked chips as equals without the rating system.
Honestly though, unless you're a gamer, both AMD and Intel have chips way, way, way faster than you'll ever need. Say some old lady wants to buy collectibles off eBay? Don't even need a computer from this decade to do it. However, I'd say the amount of desktops sold for gaming or 3D rendering, CAD, etc, are a pretty small percentage, yet those are the only users that actually take full advantage of the power of today's systems.
But in marketing to the average Joe, facts don't matter, and Intel has always been the winner of the marketing war. Dell offering some AMD chips is a minor victory for AMD, but in the end Intel would have to make some really huge mistakes to lose more ground to AMD.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I'll have to chime in. It's not just the corperate space with uptime is king. I work in the internet facing arena and the MHZ is a sales joke. We still have people on P2's because they have no need to migrate or desire because the system have been up and running for YEARS with the only thing affecting Unix server uptime is kernel upgrades. Take a Dual proc PII box with raid and hot swap everything and there isn't much to turn it off for. Granted being internet facing we go for what the customer demands and what is the best price to performance (right now thats the Opterons) and performance includes service features like hot swap everything.
No sir I dont like it.
Dell is possibly _not_ considering selling AMD machines because Sun already makes the best Opteron-based workstations and servers for a decent price.
It'd be hard to beat that.
Only if they feel the demand is there with respect to their existing partners and big contract customers.
They might be able to swing the Semperon/AMD64 chips in the high-end desktop and laptop market, however.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Just yesterday evening, I just wanted to talk to someone in the Servers/Storge division about the racks they resell (naturally none of that information is available on their website).
Of course, the whole federal sales team had left for the day. So I was stuck trying the Small Business/Healthcare guys, and they kept (1) trying to kick me off to federal (2) not wanting to work with me because they didn't believe that I was "starting a business".
They had _no one_ available for presales help. I was livid.
On the other hand, if you do talk to the federal sales team, they are wonderful and helpful. When they're there.
ARRRGH.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And for the most part (excluding laptops and printers), Dell tries not to use any hardware that would be difficult to support under linux.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Well if they do then maybe I'll actually try a DELL! ... "Dell may ..." to "Dell will ..."
If enough people push right now, by phoning and asking for an AMD machine they may listen. It may go from
Their setup CD that asks you questions and lays out the partitions (even for Win) is running Linux.
The server market is icing on the cake. Neither Intel, AMD, Compac, nor Dell, make a sizable portion of their profits on servers. Yeah they are big ticket items, but its not nearly enough volume to compete with desktop sales.
Dell can take a hit on server sales, and not see any real tangible effect.
But if some important customers were to say, we want to buy our servers and desktops from the same manufacture, to make buying simpler, and we want Opterons. Then Dell might be listening.
But Dell certainly wont be starting to sell AMDs just to ship a few more servers.
On another note, hopefully AMD can get yeilds up, and get that liscenced fab up and running, and start shipping some serious units.
Dell says it is thinking of selling AMD servers? But they said just a week ago there is no customer demand.
Dell says no AMD desktops because AMD couldn't supply enough chips? But they said last week there is no demand for AMD desktops.
Show how much you can trust what Dell says.
I have to admit to liking the Pentium 4 processor. I've burned up too many AMD Athlons to be totally comfortable with them. I also like Dell's desktop machines. I've aways built my own machines, and this Dell I'm on now is the first box I've ever had that was mass produced. It's impressed the hell out of me. The one thing that I really love - the case. Opens like a book and the drives are all right there. What other machine (other than a MAC) lets you do a hard drive swap in 10 seconds? The performance is good too. Maybe not the fastest, but it's solid. Stable. And it's quiet. Getting a new optical drive when my old one burnt out the very next day was cool. To drive into town to where I could actually buy a replacement would take 8 hours round trip and 145 bucks in gas. (I've got an old truck) So having Dell just ship it next day air was awesome. For free even. Even better. What's funny is that with my new job, if you call Dell and need some on site support... I'm the guy that shows up. How weird is that?
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