Dell Dumping Itanium

njcoder writes "In a PC World article it is disclosed and confirmed by Intel that Dell is dropping support for Itanium processors. 'After Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated that 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set offered a smoother transition to 64-bit computing, Intel released a version of Xeon with similar technology, and Dell now offers 64-bit Xeon processors across its product line.'" More from the article: "The chip maker has since backed off its original statements about Itanium and is now promoting the chip as a high-performance replacement for reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors in Unix servers from companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Hewlett-Packard, a co-designer of the processor, has embraced Itanium as the processor of choice for its high-end servers. Fujitsu. and NEC are also among the system vendors that sell servers with the processor." The story is also being reported at Ars Technica.

Comments

I Blame Sun Microsystems

[AKAImBatman]

Guess McNeally got under Michael's skin. :-P

I blame Intel

[vlad_petric]

For not making Itanium competitive enough ...

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[js3]

or maybe intel offers a better deal for them and they are greedy bstards?

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

IMHO that's not an acceptable explanation for offering zero AMD servers.

Its not as if Dell sells AMD servers at a higher price. Clearly there is an enormous amount of demand for Opterons. All the market metrics show Opterons taking a larger and larger piece of the server market. Dell's server business is hurting as a result, and still they offer no AMD machines.

Furthermore, if as you say "Intel offers a better deal" -- and that deal was based upon exclusivity. (In other words: "You get a 15% discount if you sell only Intel chips"), It seems to me that that would be illegal and anti-competitive.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[popo]

No its not like saying that at all.

If Coke said to your local supermarket: "We'll give you a 10% discount if you don't stock Pepsi -- even though Pepsi represents 36% of the market", that would be anti-competitive behaviour.

The case already went before the Japanese Trade Comission and AMD won. I have a hard time believing that the scenario is different in the US.

Re:Fair play

[diegocgteleline.es]

for using their x86-64 technology?

Well, then Intel may sue AMD aswell because of the x86 32 ISA, right?

In fact x86-64 is pretty much the same instrucion set except that it has been extended to support 64-bit registers, etc. So you could very well say that x86-64 ISA is a derivative of the x86-32 bit ISA.

Of course intel and AMD have cross-license or some shit so they can use whatever stuff they want without licensing issues, but i think it was worth the post

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[Zemplar]

"It has no technical merit."

Excuse me? Modded +5 Interesting, but incorrect on this one point.

I hope you just made an honest mistake and don't really believe that nonsense.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[TheRaven64]

This should free Intel to deploy those valuable Itanium engineers (like the ex-Alpha team) to work on something that actually generates cash (like x86 servers).

Many of the Alpha team went to work on the Opteron. Or did you think that it's resemblance to the Alpha was a coincidence?

And I don't really think Intel need to do much catching up. They are behind in the server market, and ahead in the laptop market. The server market is shrinking, and the laptop market is expanding - it sounds like they are exactly where they wish to be.

Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?

[Doctor Memory]

IMHO that's not an acceptable explanation for offering zero AMD servers.

Well, then, you're a retard. Why would someone give up a N-where-N-is-large% discount from the supplier that will provide 95% of your processors just so you can sell 5% of your volume with processors from another vendor? How are you going to explain to your shareholders that you're going to raise production costs by millions of dollars just so you can do a couple million dollars more in sales? Do you honestly think that AMD is able to offer Dell better prices than Intel?

And let's not forget that Opterons, despite "taking a larger and larger piece of the server market" still have a less than 12% share. If Dell's going to tweak Intel's nose, it would make more sense for them to go with IBM's Power line of processors for the high-end. IBM's doing well with that line; unlike HP, whose Itanium sales haven't managed to outpace PA-RISC declines.

I like Opterons (I have a Sun Ultra 20 at home), but suggesting that Dell destroy its margins just so they can offer a processor that's more appealing to you (I'm guessing you're not a Fortune 100 CIO planning to outfit a dozen or so new data centers) is just stupid.

Re:Writing has been on the wall

[akuma(x86)]

I really do believe it has no technical merit.

I am paid to design processors and have worked on SPARC, MIPS and x86 designs for a span of over 12 years.
I spend my days thinking about how to improve processors. That's all I do... all day long.

So please... enlighten me on how the Itanium architecture improves computing on any metric.

Any performance advantage that you see today is solely due to their having much larger die size and pin count budgets vs. other processors just to compensate for their having a crappy ISA. If you give the same budget to a comparable x86 or traditional RISC processor, their absolute performance and performance/watt would far exceed any Itanium.

Put a 9MB cache on an Opteron and see how well it does on SPECFP for example.
An Opteron beats the Itanium 2 handily on integer code with just 1MB of cache.

Re:not anticompetitive!

[popo]

> Fortunately for us, there are other chip manufacturers than Intel.

As there are other operating systems besides Windows. I don't think the definition of monopoly requires singularity.