Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.