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. "
We have seen these articles before. However, with Intel having to switch to dual core to increase performance due to nearing a brickwall in the area of performance increase via CPU clock increasing, perhaps Dell sees AMD as a better partner. AMD is no longer the butt of egg frying on CPU jokes thanks to their new power saving chips that actually put out less heat than Intel's Pentium 4 offerings. If I were him, I would start with AMD64 servers, because without a 64-bit AMD server offering, I think Dell is losing alot of orders to other companies like MBX.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Hm. Here in Ireland, Dell has their linux clustering group. I've got a feeling they'd love to offer opteron clusters to the european market, anyway. Dell's servers aren't quite as nice as IBM's, but sure are cheaper, and still have many features that home users and even ordinary linux geeks don't understand or need that add to the cost of professional machines for large clusters (remote management related, mainly, but also hot-swapping and such). I know they've probably lost several EU tenders for hundreds-to-thousands-processor clusters to Opteron vendors (note that IBM already offers cluster-oriented opteron servers...).
It might be worth it to Intel for people to continue to see the P4 symbol on Dell computers regardless of how much their losing on it. Dell does have a large market share.
Well the large market share is a problem, isn't it? It might be worth doing a deal with a very prominent but low market share "regardless of how much they're losing on it" but losing money on every unit to someone with a high market share is just losing a lot of money. What do you do, raise your prices to every other company to make up for your losses to Dell, making Dell even more competitive relative to them so you sell even more loss making units to Dell? It doesn't work.
Dells fear with AMD has nothing to do with pricing, and everything to do with execution. The Athlon launch party was PLAGUED by delay and pipeline stalls in getting parts from AMD. Dell sells SO many computers that they don't want to be forced to turn customers away to competitors if AMD started rationing processors.
Now that the Opteron has turned out to be everything it's cracked up to be, and in mass quantities in the channel, Dell is rightfully readdressing the AMD issue.