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Dell Rejects AMD Chips (again)
LarsWestergren writes "A few months ago Slashdot reported that Dell was considering using AMD for server CPUs, but most people rightly remained sceptical since Dell has announced this several times before and always backed out. Well, according to the Register you were right to be sceptical." From the article: "Dell, however, doesn't seem concerned by these pricing issues or the fact that Opteron outperforms Xeon on numerous benchmarks. 'We believe that Intel has responded,' Rollins said in the wire report. 'That is now beginning to put customers more at ease that they don't need to make a shift (to AMD).'"
Well, three, eight, and six consecutively is a pretty distinct pattern. I don't know about you tin-foil hatters out there, but '386' is unique enough to claim as a trademark.
If you used three numbers to identify a major product of yours, wouldn't you be a little peeved if someone else was using it too?
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
First off, I love AMD and believe the Athlon and Opteron products are far and away superior products. They're way out in front for the scientific code that I write.
However, AMD has a serious problem: even if everyone suddenly decided to dump Intel and go with AMD, it couldn't be done. AMD just doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to churn out the volume necessary to completely displace Intel. That might be comforting to Intel, because they can pretty much do anything they want, i.e. churn out inferior, high priced product, for well into the future and not worry about losing significant market share. The only way for AMD to become the dominant processor manufacturer is to slowly and PROFITABLY chip away at Intel's share, and continue investing in new plants and partners (like IBM) to produce Athlons and Opterons. Unfortunately, AMD is still on rocky ground financially. Even as we speak, they are systematically closing down their chip fabs for one week stints as a cost saving measure. I want AMD to succeed, but it is going to be much harder than some fanboys think.
386 was not a trademark for Intel. It was a part number. The court ruled that part numbers could not be trademarked.
You can trademark words, so long as they are not in common use in the field that you are trademarking them for. Evidence, Mustang and Pinto.
For desktops? Almost certainly not. For servers? Absolutely. You can bet they'd switch their production lines to higher margin server chips if they had to. It would take three months for increased numbers of finished server chips to make it out the other end of the manufacturing pipeline but soemthing could be worked out in the meantime.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I typically purchase about $15k to $30k of servers from Dell each year. Last December I asked them to guarantee to me that the server I was preparing to purchase (about $8k for one box) would perform like I needed (very high I/O speed), given that the similar one I got a year ago was barely keeping up with the load I needed.
Others with similar hardware were getting more than double the I/O performance, but were not using Dells. They had no answers for me other than 'trust us'. When I asked about AMD solutions which others had reported providing the necessary speed, they just more or less did the equivalent of staring at me over the phone.
I ended up buying an Opteron system from Iron Systems which has more then met the challenge. They are about to get yet another order for an identical system. That's $16k to Iron, and $16k less for Dell. Not to mention that they've lost my server business... probably close to $30k this year.
So it will add up. They can't keep ignoring Opteron.
The only ``intuitive'' interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
The 64bit portions of intel's CPUs are a kludge compared to AMD's. While they maintain almost perfect compatibility with the spec as per AMD's definition, intel CPUs cannot address >4GB RAM the same way. They use pointers to address this. Read Redhat's documentation on how they futzed with the kernel for intel's "64bit" CPUs so they could handle >4GB w/o all kinds of problems. Intel's CPUs run hotter (and while you think this does not matter, it causes issues for the life of components as well as the user ending up with slower and possibly less stable hardware. Dust can cause severe problems for heat and in turn cause the CPU to throttle back and lower speed. Way to go overpriced CPU) AMD's offerings in that area are superior. The only things intel has in its favor is marketing and 3d party vendor support. The new Nvidia Nforce4 Pro chipsets make AMD's Opteron line only more attractive.