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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.
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.
Nice job modding up for someone saying the exact same thing as the post.
Their website sucks, true, but they aren't alone in this. I can't think of a single business website that has a decent interface, they all universally suck.
It's like it's a fucking game with the web developers: How hard can I make it to hide the most useful shit from the end user. It's always some thing new. If I want a phone number, say, for Fed Ex, for example, I spend a good couple minutes dicking around on their site before calling information.
Anyway, Dell is my new favorite computer company. They sell the best machines and have the best support I've dealt with recently ( old Compaq customer here ). When something does break, they have a replacement part on my door step the next day, or if it's critical, the same day. And I don't pay a fucking dime for that service, it's included.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
No, AMD becomes the next Intel, geeks move onto Transmeta as AMD's prices rise. Eventually, Transmeta (or some other corp.) triumphs when AMD dies. Windows stays.
Really, if Windows is to die then either it is going be the slow nibbling we may be seeing now from Linux JDS et al or when a new architecture comes out that is faster *and* cheaper than x86 and we switch to it's OS. The death of one particular x86 vendor matters not to Microsoft. I still wouldn't rule Intel out. Or matter accurately: I'd rule them out except they still have one line left and it actually fairly succesful: Pentium M. Watch Intel sell the rest of the farm and any grandmother it can find to pump money into this project's R&D to make it a real killer.Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
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
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!"