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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.
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.
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You mean like my Sager NP4750?
Well, not quite, but its an Athlon 64 with Radeon Mobility 9700, and oh boy do I love it dearly. I chose it over a Dell so I could get the Athlon.
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.
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
You probably liked the "Dude, you're going to Hell" advertisements, too.
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.
. . . AMD's stock jumped so crazy today!
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.
Yes signed with with Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing
Help fight continental drift.
Uhhh, why on earth would I care one way or the either? Why would my hopes be raised?
1. A lot of people at Slashdot like AMD. They might also
a) Work at a company that demands Dell computers
b) Like the price and/or support that Dell gives
If Dell goes AMD they can ge the processor they want from the vendor they need.
2. Despite being recognized as doing superior processors (at the moment at least), AMD lags behind in sales to Intel and doesn't have as much cash reserve and "goodwill" reserve from the public. If AMD screws up and releases a dud in the future, that single mistake might be enough to wipe them out, and we are back to having essentially a monopoly. I don't know about you, but I like the fact that the competition is putting some fire under Intels bloated asses. Remember when they were comfortably releasing new processor with speed increases by 33 Mhz per 6 months for premium prices, even though they had the technology to go much faster? They could do that because then their only competition were themselves.
3. AMD has put a wedge into the previously rock-hard Wintel alliance, an alliance that in my opinion led to stagnation and lack of innovation. They growled at each other sometimes, but both knew that without the other they were dead and therefore supported the most braindead ideas of the other company. Now Microsoft can choose AMD (as they recently did when they announced they wouldn't support Itanium2 in future Windows), and AMD and Intel can choose to support Linux or BSD. If you have 4 entities you get much more unpredicable alliances and companies have to keep more on their toes to stay competitive. Who knows, the superior combination of AMD+Linux (or Intel+Linux!) might even sell better.
For instance, Microsoft were saying "No one wants or needs 64 bit on the desktop, and there is no Intel processor that does 64 bit so it would be nuts for us to do a 64 bit OS.", and Intel said "No one can afford or needs 64 bit on the desktop, besides their is no MS OS that does 64 bit it would be nuts for us to do 64 bit processor."
But then AMD releaed Athlon 64, and Linux came out with 64 bit support before Windows. It is a great combination but so far it is mostly people in the know who get that combination.
That is why I care, because if Dell start selling them, they get a bigger cash buffer and greater acceptance is the public mind.
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.
I doubt you meant what that actually means.
It makes the internet faster!
evil is as evil does
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...
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.
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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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All the "market cap" is this: stocks x price.
So its pretty much how much money you would need to buy the company/what the company is worth.
Intel is a MUCH bigger company than AMD. They have more plants, people, sales, etc. So all that capital is simply worth more.
More info here.
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!"
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.
Unless AMD issue new stock (or sells its own stock, which is essentially the same thing), buying it would only transfer funds to the stock owners, NOT to AMD.
Absolutely untrue, AMD would only see the cash if you were buying stock directly from them at the IPO. All transactions subject to that are subject to the Greater Fool Theorem and only put cash in the pocket of the seller. Besides, you probably already have your shares and this is an attempt to pump the market with slashdotting to get a better price. Are you from Utah by any chance?
- 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.
I admit that I'm not up at the most recent couple generations of video chipsets (except in the sense that I've read some reviews), but isn't the most likely explanation for this that ATI does a better job with thermal output and power consumption?
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...
Dell really needs to bring AMD into the lower end too. Their low end computers all feature Celerons, and as everyone knows, the Celeron is a terrible chip that is currently no cheaper than an Athlon XP chip that totally destroys the Celeron in every test.
That could be pretty interesting for Intel, as they must sell most of their Celeron chips to Dell, because I see very few of them outside of a Dell anymore.
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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