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).'"

Comments

Dell will never use AMD

[rudy_wayne]

In the '80s Intel sued AMD, twice, for producing 80386 compatible chips. The second time was for trademark infringement, essentially claiming that Intel owned the number '386'. One of the people testifying on behalf of Intel was Michael Dell.

Re:Apparently, changing chip vendors is too much w

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe dell has used amd to leverage a better deal from intel. we've seen the same thing happen with linux/open source and microsoft. organisations announce they are considering the former until microsoft jumps in with massive price reductions.

Customers are already making a shift.

[BoomerSooner]

I use AMD processors in some of my servers and am evaluating purcahsing a new rack full of hardware for migrating off our current servers (mix of AMD & Intel) that are tower based. Monarch Computers (Linux Journal runs on them) is pretty reasonable but I'm also looking at the Sun offerings.

I like Dell computers reasonably well. However we have decided to go with AMD for multiple reasons. Unfortunately they don't offer what we are looking for and as a result have lost about a $30,000 purchase. Granted 30K is peanuts to them but over time it adds up, one customer here, one customer there.

Their slogan should be "Dell, providing what we say you need, not what you desire." Hell, even their linux offerings are a joke (workstation side).

Re:Dell is back to their old trick...

[bdsesq]

Its not quite that simple. Look at what Dvorak says in his latest column--- Intel has been essentially paying OEMs not to use AMD chips.
You can read the rest at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050224. html
Its about half way down the page.

Re:Temperature Liability?

[raitchison]

I think this is no small part of Dell's decision to stick with Intel.

In the past when AMD's chips were merely "knock-off's" of Intels they had a lot of relibility problems, mostly related their their heat generation.

IMO this was caused by them designing chips that had to function like Intel chips but be different enough architecturally to keep them from getting sued (more than they already were). These contradictary requirements resulted in bass-ackwards chip designs that were inefficient. This then caused AMD to push the envelope of what the chips could handle clock speed wise. With the final result being chips with a much higher failure rate (several hundred times higher in my professional career).

I remember back in 98 or 99 (yes I know ancient history) one coustomer of mine had several thousand HP Vectra PCs, all with Intel chips. They decided to buy a batch of AMD equipped Vectras as each PC was about $30 cheaper with an AMD over an Intel CPU. Out of the 80 or so AMD equipped HP Vectras 11 of them were DOA and another 4 had their processors go out in less than a month. I know that experience left an extremely strong impression in the customers mind and mine as well.

Now things are definitely different, AMD is doing it's own thing (rather than just copying Intel's chips), doing it extremely well and using their technology and performance as selling points (not just a Still I can see how someone who has been burned (pun intended) by AMD in the past, even the very distant past would be reluctant to try it again. With Intel you know that you are paying too much but you also know nothing is going to go wrong.

From Dell's position, it's hard to screw up sticking with Intel as long as the number$ add up.

here's another good reason..

[TheHawke]

Just got done tangling with a Dell system that got it's onboard VGA plug ripped out (idiot customer didnt unscrew the thumbscrews before he yanked).
I got a wild idea about putting a MSI board into the case, only to discover that the mounting holes on the backplane do NOT match up with the HSF holes for the mounting bracket.
I sat back, cussed and stewed over this, only to come to a conclusion that Intel and Dell did a backroom agreement that they would alter the design for the HSF mounting points to keep any customer from doing a swapout of the mainboard without doing some major surgery. Fortunately I went and got a HSF from a local supplier and pretty much bypassed most of the BS that is inside a dell case.
This looks like that it was no accident, the backplane is 2 centimeters to the right of the holes on the MSI board. If you think that i'm full of it, there are TWO sets of HSF mounting holes on the backplane that are pretty much set up for certain intel boards. None of the P4 boards I have will match up with them.

That's notwhat I'm seeing

[TWX]

"...Mr Dell is deep in Intel's pocket, and wont be cooperating with AMD any time soon."

Dell comes out and announces this to keep Intel on its toes and to drive up interest in the company. It's like how Apple maintains an x86 port of the Darwin Kernel that OSX uses; not because they intend to switch to x86, but because it gives them, "see, we don't need to run on Motorola/IBM Power architecture, so if you want us to you'd better give us more of what we want," lattitude with an actual possible way to back it up.

Dell probably had some negotiations that were not going as well as they had hoped, so they made this announcement. Behind the scenes things got addressed, and now they've retracted it.

Re:Apparently, changing chip vendors is too much w

[ppanon]

maybe dell has used amd to leverage a better deal from intel. we've seen the same thing happen with linux/open source and microsoft. organisations announce they are considering the former until microsoft jumps in with massive price reductions.

The funny thing is that while that type of predatory-pricing anti-competitive behaviour would significantly hurt any other type of competition, it hurts Microsoft a lot more than it hurts Suse, Redhat, and other Linux vendors. Linux development will continue regardless, but by caving in with lowball bids, Microsoft is letting everyone else know that it's possible to get those deals if you can put up a believable bluff. It's hurting MS' future earnings and ability to pursue further R&D (aka aquisitions of promising ISVs). MS is in a war of attrition that they, while having a great headstart, are still bound to lose because, outside of Western Europe and N.A., switching to Linux isn't a bluff, it's an economic necessity.