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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. "
They'll never do it.
Dear Dell,
Please continue to offer less choices at higher prices.
Please continue to lock us in to Intel only.
Please continue to outsource your support to the clueless.
Please continue to... nevermind, I found another company.
Wow! This is turning out to be a remarkable year!
Not only are we getting Linux on the Desktop, but we're also getting AMD in Dells!
Just like last year!
Heard that. I give it a month before they revert back to their intel ways...
Call Dell and say you want quotes for an Opteron system. Dell does listen to Customers.
I wonder what kind of concession Dell wants from Intel this time 'round.
Does anyone else get the feeling that Dell doesn't know what the heck they're doing with AMD?
I guess everytime they want to apply pricing pressure on Intel, they submit a story to Slashdot.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I find it hard to believe that the average dell customer, the essentially computer illiterate home user just looking to check their e-mail and use office software really cares what CPU they have, if they even understand the difference. If people are looking for a high-end machine to get better fps at "insert game here," they usually aren't even looking at Dell.
they have fairly good technology," said Rollins
:] yup, and nukes can do a fairly large damage, and B. Gates if fairly wealthy, and Antartica is fairly cold, and
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
RIAA setup bittorrent server,
Duke Nukem Forever went gold,
Microsoft unconditionally released source code to windows.
Slashdot impliments dupe filter and story/author/editor moderation.
liqbase
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.
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FTFA:"We are still looking at AMD; they have fairly good technology"
Fairly good? What rock have they been hiding under all these years?
Nobody seriously considering changing suppliers calls the new supplier's stuff "fairly good." What's their slogan if they make the switch?
Dell Computers - Now with fairly good technology!
That said, I don't care too much. Even without Dell, AMD already has enough market pull to deflate Intel's once-ridiculous profit margins by about all they can. AMD processors aren't all that much cheaper than equivalent Intel anymore.
I'm not sure what's behind the stagnation in CPU and RAM offerings and prices the last couple years. Maybe the weak dollar?
If Dell, who has a significant presence in Austin, were to start buying from AMD, who also has a significant presence in Austin, they may be able to get some tax breaks from the Austin city council, who also have (unfortunately for Austin residents) a significant presence on Austin.
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.
Look at the published % margins of Intel and AMD and realize that this is much greater gap than you would get simply from Intel's ability ot command a price premium -compared to AMD, Intel's manufacturing costs per die are LESS, so it's not "so expensive".
/.ers are infuriated that the stock market doesn't reward AMD stock price like that of Intel stock price, but if they understood that share value is determined by the ability to make money, not just pump out cool stuff, they'd understand. Making money means keeping your cost-to-selling-price ratio healthy and AMD doesn't manufacture at lowest price and doesn't sell for a premium price.
Say what you want about AMD's microprocessor design prowess, they are definately not in Intel's league in terms of wafer yield and other areas of manufacturing prowess that dictate cost to produce.
Many clueless
(BTW, please don't assume this represents some kind of consumer-friendly behaviour for AMD - if they could charge a big premium over Intel's product, they would in a heartbeat. And of course, the poster that said this is a price negotiation tool on Dell's part is correct)
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.