Slashdot Mirror
Dell Might do AMD
mboverload writes "In a move that will surely make waves in the industry, Dell's CEO, Kevin Rollins, has said they may provide machines decked out with AMD CPU's if their customers really want them. "We are still looking at AMD; they have fairly good technology," said Rollins. "
Dells biggest customer is the U.S. government and corporate buyers. While some of them might not care I know the .gov is pretty picky about what goes into their systems.
Also a lot of web hosting companies use Dell servers, it would be nice to be able to order dual Opteron boxes that include a support contract.
our server room is 90 feet long, with racks and racks of Dells. If it means better performance, you bet we'll be interested. I'm going to make sure they hear from us.
This already was said in the past. It won't happen.
See, Intel has 80% of the desktop market and 90-95% of the x86 server market. This is quite unlike to change. It doesn't really matters how fast are AMD CPUs, people seems to care more about the chipsets, and that's the achiles' heel of AMD, they just make CPUs not chipsets.
With intel, I can buy a motherboard with a intel or serverworks chipsets, which is not exactly the same than a VIA/Nvidia shitty chipset that people uses with AMDs.
Funny.. I run an AMD Athlon XP2600+ and have been running this system with an Abit board for about 2 years now.
I don't remeber the last time it crashed on me actually - it has been impeccably reliable, and performance is still good despite its age!
I have an AMD box that I put a video-capture card into and I wouldn't be able to capture more than a few minutes of video before the system would either lock-up or spontaneously reboot.
It's just as likely you have a flacky motherboard or flacky ram as chipset incompatibilities. For example, my system here started to suffer from random reboots and crashes till I finally isolated the problem to the memory having single bit errors when warm. I run an AMD 2800xp, have 3 drives, and my PCI slots are full. While my cooling system should be adquate [120mm case fan running 5v rather than 12v, 90mm power supply fan, 70mm cpu fan, 60mm GFX fan]. My issues go away when I use PNY memory, and they go away when I add fans and run coverless. I am able to capture up to 4hrs of video without crashing.
One of the reasons I started going with VIA chipset motherboards was the compatibility with a vast variety of memory including that cheepo stuff. The disadvantage is you get given this cheepo stuff that people can't use on their intel chipsets that has intermittent hard to diagnose issues. Also many OEMs designate AMD as the cheep system and use sub standard parts doesn't really help matters.
There were issues with non-intel chipsets in the 1990s. Microsoft was pretty much an intel only house and no thought was given to anything else. I remember many headaches with TNT2 video cards and both Cyrix and VIA chipsets. But these days AMD is very popular at MS esp since the AMD Opteron.
Why not bring up your issues on your friendly neighborhood capture card news group, and your motherboard's newsgroup. If nothing else there always is someone out there to help you with trouble shooting, or perhaps someone already documented the issue.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Dell has said this every 6 months or so for the past.. well, since I can remember. They say it to get better deals from intel. In 2 months you'll have a story saying 'Dell decided to stick with intel after all'.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
"Problem is, Intel manufacturing is so expensive, they can't afford to give Dell any more of a discount... their bluff is going to be called... This should be interesting... "
Sorry, you don't have a clue here.
Intel's manufacturing is cheaper than AMD. They have a cheaper process which also gives better yields, and perhaps the most important, they have a much larger volume which usually leads to cheaper costs.
If you need a hint on what is going on, look at the financial statistics for Intel and AMD. Intel _makes_ money on it's CPUs while AMD barely, sometimes does.
AMD is happy when Intel have high prices because then they have a chance of getting profit.
Intel _makes_ money on it's CPUs while AMD barely, sometimes does.
... the Athlon 64, while not priced as aggressively as AMD's chips in the past, ends up offering better performance than the Pentium 4, for less money. What more could you want?
While you may be correct that Intel's manufacturing is cheaper than AMD's, isn't it the case, however, that Intel can (and does) sell slower, less capable processors at higher prices than AMD? It seems to me I've always been able to look at Pricewatch and see equivalent Intel processors priced higher than AMD processors.
To make my point, I picked a processor at "random," an AMD64 3400+ and looked it up on tomshardware and found this performance comparison. Then I went to pricewatch and found the following prices, AMD64 3400+ = $188, Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz: $200. I looked up AMD processors and the first article I read said:
Obviously some people want it to say Intel at any cost.
AMD's technology is on par with Intel.
The Opteron vs. Xeon reviews lately show AMD winning quite handily. In one review the Xeon overheated, and the author had to keep the case open to finish the tests!
I think Intel has put so many resources behind Itanium, that AMD64 and Opteron really took them by suprise. Just comparing the HT architecture to Xeon's old shared-bus architecture is really telling. The fact that Sun is jumping all over Opteron and not Xeon is also interesting.
In x86-land, AMD is now tremendously underrated, and Intel is riding on pure inertia.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
>> AMD chips are very stable
Have you tried using > 4GB on your AMD64 ? If you are like me, you get daily crashes. Why ?
Go read the April 7 slashdot posting here.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=127
AMD64 systems have proplems with fully populated DIMMS. Crap like this is unacceptable to corporations purchasing 1000's of boxes. It is also unacceptable to DELL. Every customer problem cost DELL money.
I'll vouch for Dell hardware any day. I've worked with a lot of newer dell hardware, from Dimensions to Optiplexes to some of their server line, and they're definitely solidly put together and well designed, much better than most other computer manufacturers.
The dimension 2400 sitting next to my desk right now has been running non stop since it arrived with the exception of the installation of a S3 ViRGE video card as a second monitor. My only complaint is that they didn't include an AGP port, but for the money, I can't complain.
It's been a long time.
Just because a few slashdotters say AMD kicks Intels ass does not make it so. These folks are in their Dorm room or in the parents basement and they read a few benchmarks. In the real world, other issue are more important. Costs, manufacting, volume, quality, support, etc...
1. AMD cannot supply the volume DELL requires. (AMD would need to double their capacity just to supply all of DELL's volume.)
2. AMD cannot supply the complete systems Intel does. DELL does not have RnD. Intel supplys complete proc, chipset, motherboard, drives, bios, etc.
3. AMD cannot supply the quality DELL requires. All AMD64 systems have issues when all DIMM slots are used. DELL's would be getting class action law suits if they shipped millions of that crap.
4. AMD cannot touch Centrino for performance and power. Mobile is the fastest gowing segment. This year Mobile will ship more than desktops. DELL has picked the best supplier for the fastest growing market segment.