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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).'"
If Dell doesn't want to switch to a better product then the question then becomes "why not switch away from Dell?"
They get Intel jealous by flirting with AMD and when Intels reluctantly lowers their price Dell goes back to Intel. It is likely that they would do to Microsoft with Linux or *BSD to get the price of Windows down.
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Dell at this point is entirely based on the business model of being the least alarming name out there. As a result, the companies they choose as vendors are the ones with the least alarming name. When you pay for a Dell you aren't playing for a functional computer, you're paying for the promise that there will be nothing exceptional about your computer whatsoever. This is what people want. Exceptional things are risky and scary.
Because most people don't know it exists.
I have a shitty sig!
Why is it that we always have these big companies that we simply rant on. Think. Dell is a company. They want to make money. People are buying their computers. Why would they bother switching? Even if switching to AMD would be cheaper, I don't see why everyone treats this as some big conspiracy. So Dell supports Intel. Is that wrong? They can do whatever the hell they want with their products and choose to support whatever companies.
One less vendor to consider...
If Dell wants to continue to sell crap, just let them... I'm not buying.
how long until
Don't forget also that the key to Dell's performance is it's supply chain performance, which relies on just-in-time deliveries and vendor-managed inventory. It would be a huge operational risk to switch vendors like that, so AMD would have to provide more than just a better processor to win that business.
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DELL isn't gonna stay in the desktop PC business too long if they don't change their strategies a bit. DELL machines and parts are way over-priced, customers are getting smarter and smarter. Those smart enough probably won't buy a DELL.
Technical considerations aside, there are business reasons that could contribute to this decision. Aside from the issues of switching processor vendors, there's also the issue of production capacity.
Intel is a much larger company than AMD. I was under the impression that AMD doesn't (yet) have the production capacity to match Intel - could they actually manage to supply at the rate Dell might require? It's not in Dell's interests to go with a component it can't obtain in sufficient bulk, regardless of technical issues.
How about one CPU being at least as 'fast' (in real world terms) as another mfger's CPU even though running at a lower clocks speed, and running significantly cooler and using a lot less power? AND it's less expensive than that rival mfger's CPU. Oh and it's 64 bit as opposed to the other mfger's CPU which is 32 bit.
Yes, you are a prick.
...make anti-Dell remarks in public - and refuse to ever offer them a bargain. Then maybe Dell will stop trying to whore wintel for money.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
This is looking kind of fishy if you ask me and strange. Sure a company has the right to ship whichever chips its wants but it surely does not make business sense right now for Dell.
Price conscience IT departments wont like the price for a SMP Xeon server compared to an SMP Opteron.
What's to say that Dell isn't paying the same for a Xeon as they would for an Opteron? And pocketing the change? That's why it makes business sense.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
That's a nice opinion, but the court's opinion was the opposite of yours, and the two uses of the word "opinion" in this sentence have quite different meanings. Hint: You don't win.
Hence, the "Pentium", which was trademarkable. (Even if it was a rather wierd time to jump into that naming scheme, what with Sexium or Hexium (depending on who you ask) coming up next, which is also why we still have Pentiums. Think about how silly the name "Pentium 4" is if taken literally....)
> Nobody gives a shit that it runs at a lower clockspeed.
yep, because that means at the same clockspeed, it goes 'faster'
> Nobody gives a shit that it uses very slightly less power.
you would if you were paying the power bill for 200+ machines running them
>And the fact it runs in 64-bit mode is totally fucking irrelevant if you're running Windows (like just about all of Dell's customers).
And if you aren't running windows?
think before you type
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?
As another poster already mentioned, this was settled in court in favor of AMD. Intel claimed they owned the rights to the "name" 386. The court said that under U.S. law you cannot copyright universally used terms which are in the public domain. This includes numbers, so nobody can copyright 286, 386, 486, etc. As the other poster also mentioned, the next generation chip was about to be named 586 and we know how that changed. At the time PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wrote that Intel went through an extensive naming/copyright search and paid lawyers and marketing people millions of dollars to come up with the name Pentium. Dvorak joked that the name sounds more like a toothpaste brand than a name for a CPU.
And when the customers add up enough to be significant, they will switch.
As important as it is to you to have AMD, it really isn't for the majority of their customers.
Why would Dell stick with a product, if they could be more successful with a different product? What exactly are you suggesting? Some sort of conspiracy? They're deliberately making less profit, just to annoy AMD? Notify the stockholders, bring a lawsuit.
The gamerz who care only about FPS bragging rights, and the IT professionals who have to take Real Life operational requirements into consideration. My site operates thousands of workstations and scores of servers. They suck a ton of power, and the money for the electric bill comes out of my depts budget. CPUs which consume less power, and run cooler, while delivering the same amount (or more) of processing horsepower is of great interest. And 64 bit? Sure. Many of the WS's run Windows, but many more don't, and none of the servers do either. 64 bit is an important consideration to some. We aren't all playing games on overclocked Pentiums with boy-racer neon and twelve LED-equipped fans, knowing that mom and dad pay the bills.
Dell sells a great number of computers, but really, AMD needed OEMs during the days of the K5, and early days of the Athlon. since the Athlon grabbed the lead, and now since the Athlon64 is leading all CPUs, AMD really doesnt need Dell. Anyone looking for performance gets an Athlon64 server. Anyone looking for big-company machines gets IBM or Sun. Anyone looking for cheap servers would get Dell, unless they want to go real cheap in which case they'd choose a custom-built server using AMD (Dells cheapest server is $480, IBM's 206 is $500 CDN).
So really Dell is counting on Intel's special price-cuts for Dell for profits. As soon as that dries up, or if Intel provides such pricecuts to HP or the likes, Dell will simply have to get back to AMD.
Customers with brand-name loyalty will always go to IBM or sun, have never seen brand-name loyalty to HP or Dell. Either way AMD's lack of reliabiity is the last of reasons to not sell AMD
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Dell has been Intel's kiss ass for decades. Can you begin to imagine how their commercial relationship would be rotting if they switched to AMD for *some* of their products? All technical matters aside, seriously: how could they do that? If they did, I'm sure someone would even be fearing for his own life...
Wow you hit the nail on the head and I don't believe you truely realize it.
In my experience companies only change when there is pain involved. By then it is usually too late to lead in a new area. They go in to "protective" mode instead of the risk taking that made them large in the first place. Heck it even applies to how they manage their employees.
So, it is easy for Dell to stay with Intel, until they suffer some pain. They will go in to the "protection" mode for as long as they can and "if" AMD continues to gain traction in the industry then Dell will eventually switch but they will give some other Dell wanabee the traction needed to be a serious competitor in the future. They have the ability to stop it now, but alas they won't.
Kinda like IBM could have gone direct to consumer before Dell did and have stopped Dell from becomming what they are now.
Lastly, as I said before this goes far more than just AMD, it has to do with the entire culture of a lot of companies. They will do things like screw their employees as much as possible, to the point until it begins to hurt their bottom line.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Since this article is about servers: people who buy them do care if something is faster than something else at the same clockspeed, if it uses less power, and if it has a 32- or 64-bit architecture. And in that market, way more than 1% of the customers don't run Windows.
With so much bitching about how much Dell sucks and AMD is better blah blah blah, I thought I'd offer my experience.
First off, I have never dealt with Dell Home before, only Dell Small Business. Rumor has it that the latter division has better prices. What I needed was a 1U dual processor rack mount server. I needed it for a crazy low price because it was going to feed a donation-funded service, and I needed the hardware before I could wait for the cash. I looked at almost everyone I could find: HP and IBM were way too expensive for what I could find (their websites were kind of annoying too), random box vendors like Monarch wanted to charge me for shit like $80 to install Fedora (no thanks, I wanted Debian) and other stuff like silver grease for $15 per processor, and others like Penguin Computing who looked great but were just too expensive.
Ultimately it came down to some Dell 1U servers that were giving away free double hard drive capacity upgrades and double RAM on their magic rotating deals. Yeah, the deal changes and will probably be better next week, but what the hell. I bought two and waited.
The servers are very nice for the price. They come with wonderful stuff like BIOS level serial console redirection, too, that seems to be some super-cost option from random box builder. They're rock solid, very fast, and Dell builds them with Linux support in mind anyway. I bought mine with no OS, rather than paying some mystical install tax.
I like AMD processors as well as the next guy - all three desktop systems I've built have been AMD processors. But I went with Dell because they had what I needed with a price I was willing to pay for it. I am, by no means, a "cost is no object" player and I really don't have an extra $600 to fudge with.
Now, if I missed someone out there who can beat the $1500 price tag (I usually buy in multiples of two) of the Dells I have that uses Opteron processors, I will definately look at them for my next purchase. I prefer AMD, but the Xeons in my Dell servers will have to do.
As I sad at the beginning, maybe this isn't the case when you are looking for home computers or some workstations, but I buy Apple for that stuff, anyway. Mac for the desktop and iX86 for the rack. The Xserve is nice, but fscking expensive.
this is my sig
It is true that AMD doesn't have the production capabilities to supply enough chips if Dell decided to completely drop Intel and use AMD. However, such an idea is as stupid as it is crazy. Dell doesn't even have a single model that uses AMD chips. If Dell decided to use AMD, they would most likely start with a single model to see how well it sells and AMD should have the capacity to handle that.
Dell's market share and sales increased again this quarter, as it has in most all the past quarters for many years.
That is because of very many satisfied customers, steadily improving quality which is better than the big competitors (according to the big surveys), better customer satisfaction than the big competitors (according to the big surveys), etc.
So according to a very large number of customers, Dell sells what the customers need, not just what they say they want.
Hmm, actual facts seem to contradict the BS opinions of the Big Guy Bashers.
I suppose now that IBM is a good guy, you all will have to go back to raving about IBM PCs.
I do not understand why that hasn't already occurred.
Doesn't IBM ship AMD?
Seems to me it is a rave made in heaven, according to you AMD fanatics.
Linux loving, AMD shipping IBM.
Funny I am the first to even mention it.
HP ships AMD, too.
Why are they both loosing market share to Dell?
What shift?
Oh, I am a Dell server design engineer.
wake up and hold your nose
Apple maintains a Darwin port on x86 because they recognize that keeping the core OS a cross-platform effort leads to better coding. It's a widely known tenent of software engineering that cross-platform coding 'forces the programmers to stay honest', i.e. keeps them from codifying the weird quirks and squeaks and bells of the target hardware. I doubt if Apple uses it as a 'threat' to make IBM nervous.
Dell does not make their own motherboards. In fact, Dell does not make anything at all, they assemble other companies components (and even that is often outsourced). Things like motherboards are contracted out to the lowest bidder. This is exactly the same way that HPaq builds their machines as well.
As for Serverworks/Broadcom (Serverworks was bought out a couple years ago), they do not yet have an AMD chipset out, but are working on one. In fact, since Intel decide to yank Serverworks license for the 800MT/s Xeon bus, they don't really have much choice except to make AMD chipsets. It's still a work-in-progress though. Pretty much all of the current Opteron servers use AMD's own 8000 series chipset.
But the price is where you're argument breaks down because you're forgetting that Dell does NOT buy through anything that even remotely resembles retail channels. AMD chips would NOT save Dell any money at all because there is no way in hell AMD could undercut the pricing that Dell gets from Intel by any meaningful amount.
It doesn't much matter if you're talking about desktops or servers, Dell does NOT pay much of anything for their processors (or any other component for that matter). The cost of PC systems, except at the VERY high-end (low volume) is almost entirely comprised of the cost to assemble and support those systems. Ohh, that and the Microsoft tax.
"but I seem to recall the Opteron systems were about 10-20% more expensive."
In terms of SMP performance, Opteron systems are about 80% faster that XEON systems. If you are going to run some sort of database on your server, an Opteron solution that is 10-20% more expensive would be worth it.
Have you even seen the reviews/benchmarks that compare the SMP XEON to SMP Opteron systems?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Since Toyoto never offered a H1 Hummer-like Vehicle,saying they lost 100k$ on a lost Sales,makes you or me look stupid.
I live in the Present and constructing something in the Future (if they sell AMD,i would buy from them),shows a new "Style of Life",i discovered.It basicly says" i am too stupid and blame others for things they wont do or they make". I hope this will end soon.