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Dell to Use AMD Chips in its Servers
garfangle writes "Dell has decided to include AMD's Opteron processor in its product line of servers. This is the first time Dell has used AMD chips within its own Dell branded products (excluding the recently acquired Alienware computers)." From the News.com article: "The deal appears to be confined to servers at this point. The news came along with the release of Dell's earnings results, which were in line with the disappointing warning the company provided last week. Revenue was $14.2 billion, up 6 percent from last year, but net income slid 18 percent to $762 million. Several times during the last few years, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has hinted that the company was right around the corner from introducing products based on AMD's chips."
...will this get to the workstations! That's where I need my horsepower.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
At last.... my love is comin' home! Now this means we can't equate Dell with Hell in terms of heat output?
Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness...
Hopefully AMD can keep up with production of their chips as I'm sure this will lead into desktop models not being far behind.
http://www.reactos.org/
Somebody company will eventually try it.
I'm finally happy.
It's about time Dell wised up to AMD.
update Dell has agreed to use Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip in multiprocessor servers by the end of the year, ending a long-standing policy of sticking exclusively with Intel.
The PC maker made the move public in its first-quarter earnings press release on Thursday. Speculation has mounted for years as to whether the company would adopt the company's chips, despite Dell's exclusive relationship with rival Intel to this point. AMD has enjoyed a performance lead in server benchmarks over Intel's Xeon processors.
"We welcome Dell, and Dell customers, to the world of AMD64," Marty Seyer, an AMD senior vice president for commercial business, said in a statement distributed after Dell's earnings release. Dell executives delayed the start of an earnings call with the press and were unavailable to comment further.
Although the deal appears to be confined to servers at this point, it still represents another win for AMD, which has had a long string of gains over its rival.
Even as it said it would launch some multiprocessor servers using AMD chips, Dell noted that it plans to launch new servers using Intel's Woodcrest microprocessors as well as desktops and notebooks with new Intel chip families.
Dell's decision to abandon its longstanding all-Intel policy comes amid less-than-stellar earnings for the first quarter. The results were in line with the warning the company provided last week. Revenue was $14.2 billion, up 6 percent from last year, but net income slid 18 percent to $762 million. Dell said it's no longer giving specific quarterly financial guidance, though it did say the second quarter should be similar to the first.
Dell said on Thursday it was accelerating its plans for $3 billion in cost cuts and will spend $100 million on improving its customer service.
Company founder Michael Dell admitted the company's performance over the last year had been disappointing. "I think there are lots of opportunities for us to do quite a bit better than we did last year," he said at the Future in Review conference Monday. "We didn't recognize how competitive the market was going to be."
Several times during the last few years, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has hinted that the company was right around the corner from introducing products based on AMD's chips. Ever since AMD introduced Opteron in 2003, the processor has enjoyed an advantage over Intel's Xeon. During an extended period in 2005, server vendors Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM were shipping dual-core versions of the Opteron processor, and Dell could offer only single-core Xeon processors.
Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron said that a lack of AMD-based systems has hurt Dell in the server business, which, though a fairly small unit market, accounts for a disproportionate share of PC industry profits.
"They've been feeling a lot of competition from Opteron products from the other Tier 1 players," McCarron said, pointing specifically to IBM, HP and Sun.
"Presumably it got to the point where Dell had to decide what mattered more--loyalty or trying to deal with the competition," he said.
While late to the market, McCarron said, Dell could still nab a piece of the Opteron server pie.
"This is a very competitive business," McCarron said. "The fact that they have lost market share doesn't mean that they can't regain it."
Meanwhile, Dell said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it plans to sell up to $1 billion short-term unsecured notes, known as commercial paper.
I wonder if Satan is wearing a hat with earflaps?
Dell's finally seen the light. Given Dell's (past) market share in the server market, this is definately a big win for AMD. Let's hope it's not too late in the game, though.
One has to wonder, however, will there be any financial reprocussions from Intel after the announcement of this deal? If so, would it only push Dell further into AMD's lap?
$ man woman *
-bash:
Dell blah blah blah AMD blah server blah.
I really think the reason they're finally using AMD chips is that AMD will finally have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell. Fab36 is delivering revenue now, and will ramp more as the year goes by. Between Fab36 and their relationship with Chartered Semi, they can supply Dell with the chips they need. And since its most likely they'll be 4S (8 core) servers, for ever server dell sells, they'll need 4 chips from AMD.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Will it be like their linux support where you have to hunt around for it and cast a spell to get a crippled version of it?
Michael Dell always bows to Microsoft and Intel. His cooperation with AMD will be to sabotage it as he does with Linux.
Buy an HP or build your own.
I dumped my shares and they're up 15% after hours. Dammit!
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I'm sure they found the processors... satisfactory.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I agree - the only way I could care less about something Dell does is when there is a story on them selling linux desktop computers.
I want me some flying bacon!
It seems to me that anyone reading slashdot that works in the industry might be happy to know that if in the server market, they can now get AMD servers from another major player. *You* may find this boring, but by no means does that mean that *everyone* finds it boring.
Am I wrong, or is it not the first time that Dell announces such a move ?
*You* may find this boring, but by no means does that mean that *everyone* finds it boring.
You know, you're right. I guess the only people who find it boring are the people who matter.
Thanks for your commentary, no move along.
... when Intel makes them a new offer? I'll believe it when I see the product on the shelf. Or e-shelf.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Satan needs his parka! Apple goes to Intel Dell goes AMD Next thing you know Vista will ship. Someone else mentioned Intel trying to strongarm Dell over this. I highly doubt it since Intel is currently in court over this kind of practice right now.
Is he strong? Listen bud, He's got radioactive blood.
Buy some earplugs and mount the server under your desk. Kills 2 birds with one stone... or 2 stones...
Karnal
I bought an AMD once. Then two week later...BAM!
AIDS!
When we compared the power draw for opterons versus itaniums at the time when such a battle was being contested, the results were pretty bleak for Intel and anyone associated with them. We setup a subsidary company to build custom servers for our project and we saved pry 20,000 dollars in electricity costs over the life of the project. 3 years and 2000 servers. Why is Intel so stupid when it comes to power consumption for server processors? The air conditioning is what gets you when you have 2000 200-300 watt proccessors that is a helluva lot of energy to cool.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
This means Dell is doomed!
Or was it Apple? Yes! This means Apple is Doomed!
... what will actually happen to Alienware. One can be pretty sure that Intel has already put a lot of pressure to have Alienware make Intel-only machines. Let us see how this new story correlates with Intel launching new chips. Maybe Dell want a really good deal for Conroe chips and Intel want a premium price.
Who the fuck cares about this shit anymore?
Ummm... everyone but you? Shit, I despise Dell. They build crap boxes and give crap support for those crap boxes. How ever I still wanted to know when this would happen. Dell and SuperMicro where the only two large server vendors left that where "Intel Only". Last year (if I remember correctly) SuperMicro finally started selling Opterons. So that left Dell all alone as the only major server vendor to NOT offer an AMD Opteron solution. Which made me even more curious as to when they would finally start selling AMDs. Well, that day has come, pretty news worthy I would say. Interesting enough that we should commemorate this day ever year? No, hardly. But still news worthy and interesting to read about.
Ken Rollins gave a interview on Bloomberg. He equivocated all over the place about using AMD in anything but its high end servers. When pressed on it, he refused to be pinned down. "All we are talking about today" is the phrase. He continued to pump for the Intel chips. "We are very excited about Intel one and two socket" offerings. "All we are really announcing today" is about all they got out of him.
Wait a sec..
Apple switches from PowerPC to Intel
Dell switches from Intel to AMD
Now all that's needed is for slashdotters to switch from AMD to PowerPC and the circle is closed!
Sometimes Apple gets it right, sometimes they get it wrong. If it weren't for their long suffering but loyal fan base, they'd probably have gone bankrupt a long time ago. AMD has been the leader in performance for a couple of years now. Now that Apple is switching to Intel at the same time everyone else is moving to AMD, Steve Jobs has made another critical error that will sorely test his customers. Luckily for him, they can put up with a lot of frustration and have a lot of patience. They can even spin it to "win" for Apple.
AMD Issues Statement on Dell Decision to Offer Customers a
2006-05-18 16:36 (New York)
Choice
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2006
AMD (NYSE:AMD) released the following statement today
regarding the announcement Dell Inc. made in its quarterly earnings
statement that it intends to offer AMD Opteron(TM) Dual Core
processor-based servers.
"We welcome Dell, and Dell customers, to the world of AMD64," said
Marty Seyer, AMD senior vice president, Commercial Business. "Dell is
a customer-focused company and we're pleased to see that they are
listening to their customers and providing them the choice of
innovative AMD products. We look forward to working closely with Dell
and bringing the benefits of AMD's leading performance-per-watt
solutions to Dell's customers.
... to check if this is not another "Microsoft buys Linux" article but since today is not April 1st I guess I just don't give a crap. BTW Dell is very close to anonymous in Romania where IBM, HP, Fujitsu & DIY servers rule almost 100% of the market.
They were too good for AMD while they were on their way up and living the good life, now at the first sign of trouble and as people are starting to lose interest they embrace it. They are not offering AMD becasue they want to but becasue they feel they have no other choice. I wonder if this "me too" sentiment is going to extend to their AMD line of servers? This was the right move at the wrong time
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
to host Duke Nukem Forever DM severs!
> No, but he did just lose a snowball fight to Hitler...
Well, you would have too! I mean, no one expected to see tanks used like that...
You can test it by yourself:
1) Go to http://www.amd.com/
2) Search for "Pacifica" (their upcoming enterprise technology for virtualization)
3) Click on the first link that their search engine returns ("AMD's Virtualization Solutions - Optimizing Enterprise Services")
You get a HTTP 404 error. It has been like this for two months now! What an embarrasment for their marketing dept...
And there's no mention of the estimated launch date of Pacifica processors anywhere on their site (or it's simply too hard to find). People are trying to make spending plans here and one can't get reliable information from AMD about one of its most important enterprise technologies planned for release this year!
They just look amateurish. Sad to say that, since they still have technological advantage over Intel and taking care of good marketing would seem to be a matter of some very simple steps.
AMD's share price went up 15% AH in response to the news of Dell using their chips in their servers. How this is not connected to the topic, I do not know.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I guess that means that Apple is not a "major PC maker" ?
I tend to think DELL has been using AMD to squeez Intel on processor pricing. I am guessing that Intel has finally reach the point where it can't compete against AMD. I would speculate that DELL can expect a price increase on the Intel processors they buy after start using AMD processors.
No need to wait ...
and use them to crack the Human-Chimp Hybrid Genome from bone marrow from our monkey-loving human ancestors six million years ago!
... woah, mind back to my work ...
Say, that chimp's looking awful nice there
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Somewhere in Wall Street: "BUY AMD ! BUY AMD !"
For your information, /. readers, AMD predicted a few months ago (google "amd 4p server share") that they target 50% of the 4-way server market share at some point in 2006. So if Dell had decided to stick with Intel it would have meant that they would have restricted themselves to less than 50% of this market. Dell have really been stupid to wait so long to sell AMD servers, they have already lost a lot of money because of this (current headline on marketwatch.com in bold font: "Dell profit falls 18%").
In other news...
Hell freezes over.
Microsoft Open-sources all their software.
Adobe gives photoshop away for free.
Etc.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Can I have a 4 or 8 core Opteron Mac, pppplease?
I know places like Penguin Computing will sell me a 4 core Opteron workstation for $2500, but make it shiny and Macish and I'll happily pay $3000.
I am a mac fanboy.
Now back to agonizing over whether the wimpy graphics in the MacBook might actually be tolerable for the system which is otherwise a great deal. Oi!
Start Running Better Polls
The chipset of XBox was licensed from AMD, and now XBox 360 goes PPC.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
There are many music related softwares are Mac only, so many musicians are Mac only.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Don't worry. Their new cpus are down to 65w. Of course the new ram will use up 400w instead of the old 130w.... but it's the cpu that counts, right?
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
Dell needs Opterons for quad processor servers. Xeons scale extremely poorly thanks to their old fashioned frontside bus architecture. Opterons scale almost linearly thanks to their onboard memory controllers and HyperTransport. And if Dell is going to sell 4P Opteron servers then it's kinda silly not to sell 2P as well. Intel can have the uniprocessor rabble, cheapskates buying Celeron "servers".
thanks
I just started working at Dell here in Canada, and the #1 question on the first day when they told us about the Alienware merger was "Will Dell start selling AMD ?" Everyone wants to see them push out some serious gaming goodness for the XPS line. They have some wicked new designs coming out, I wouldn't be surprised to see an AMD-powered Dell desktop released around XMas.
:D
And if they don't, I will accept brib^H^H^H^Hdonations to lobby management
-Billco, Fnarg.com
According to CNET, this is all just empty hype. Dell is only using AMD for "four-way servers", of which they sell only a few per quarter, and for recently-purchased Alienware. For everything else, they are sticking with straight Intel.
I bought a tyan thunder k8we board about a year ago, dropped in two high efficiency 246's, 3G RAM and installed gentoo and have been loving it ever since. Best computer I've ever had, bar none. Fast for development, fast for services, fast for games. I never bog it down, even with 6 or 7 active tasks going. The hypertransport is great. There's quite a bit of an upgrade path, too... with the new dual core opterons reaching 2.6GHz/core or 10.2GHz in a 2 way smp box. Yow. Not exactly cheap for those processors, tho. Buying the kit off ebay'll save a good bit and allow for customization, tho it won't come pre-assembled, of course.
... to share among all 32 threads. And forget about multimedia instructions from the V9 instruction set.
It works if your loads are cache-friendly (and thus memory friendly), and very seldom use any advanced instructions. (That means you're going to want a crypto offload card too...)
Basically it's good for running your web head ends... and maybe a terminal server. Or as an advanced routing platform. Maybe you'd consolidate and run all your LDAP repositories out of it. But its not a good choice for computational loads, virtualizing machines, or processing large data sets.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... that they will introduce motherboards based on the new "C-C-C-Combo Breaker 105 hits" technique:
AMD 8131 PCI-X tunnel + NVidia 2200 MCP (and either a 2050 MCP or some Winbond BS)
This lets you leverage 4-way with PCI-X hanging off one socket's HT with PCIe and GIG-e hanging off the other.
On their uber big 4U systems they'll do the 8151 + 8131 deal w/o NVidia cuz "we don't need no PCIe".
And ServerWorks? I hope Dell knows to stay well enough away.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Why does anybody use Intel CPUs for anything anymore?
As far as I can tell, AMD CPUs these days are cheaper, more innovative, faster, and more power-efficient than Intel CPUs, in the budget, desktop, and server markets. I won't buy Intel anymore, my last 5 computers have been Athlon 64, Athlon XP, K6-3, K6-2, and Cyrix.
I'm aware that AMD has sometimes had problems supplying enough volume to customers, but is there any other downside? I mean, at work we have all these ugly-as-sin black Dell minitowers in terribly-designed cases with the front USB ports facing the wrong way almost to the point of uselessness. I don't get it... why do so many people love Dell and Intel?
My bicyles
Why does anybody use Intel CPUs for anything anymore?
As far as I can tell, AMD CPUs these days are cheaper, more innovative, faster, and more power-efficient than Intel CPUs, in the budget, desktop, and server markets. I won't buy Intel anymore, my last 5 computers have been Athlon 64, Athlon XP, K6-3, K6-2, and Cyrix.
I'm aware that AMD has sometimes had problems supplying enough volume to customers, but is there any other downside? I mean, at work we have all these ugly-as-sin black Dell minitowers in terribly-designed cases with the front USB ports facing the wrong way almost to the point of uselessness. I don't get it... why do so many people use Dell and Intel?
My bicyles
He's correct that Godwin's law wasn't invoked, and the comment afterwards is just hilarious!! :D
And this time it won't be massively overpriced and underperforming! Oh wait, a Dell? Hold on.... let me see which of the thousands of competitors is offering a cheaper amd64 option that will run circles around you. Seriously, I haven't recommended buying a Dell EVER, and so far I've never been proven wrong.
The fact that they are THIS LATE to the game on AMD, and that this is the ONLY AMD OPTION they are selling just goes to show you that they are no longer the market leader, and probably never will be again. This is an EXCELLENT time to sell Dell stock, except you might have been even smarter 6 months ago.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I work for a fairly large managed hosting company, and we host Dell or 2U whitebox servers. If the customer has wanted AMD, they would have to get a whitebox. On the enterprise segment, our customers have extreme uptime demands and proactive monitoring with timely reaction is critical. Dell servers are much easier to support in that:
* MOM reports to our monitoring team any Dell alerts (including ALL hardware problems, and predictive failure notices),
* The Dell Remote Access Cards allow us console access to the servers when they aren't otherwise accessible remotely, including the entire POST process.
Enterprise customers demanding AMD processors (or otherwise dodging the cost of Intel Dell servers) don't get these features, and their application availability is put at higher risk. With 12,000 servers, our company has been crying to Dell for a long time to offer AMD. I think this has a lot more to do with industry demand than a new fab plant opening.
Oh, see, now you've inspired me. With apologies to Disney and Elton John
(to the tune of "The Circle of Life"):
From the day Apple switched to use Next
and transitioned from Mac OS 9
They could run everything
on another machine
they compiled
on IA-32
Some say: Intel cut a deal!
Some say: Why not AMD?
But what you can see
It's not PowerPC
They just recompiled, can't you see?
In the circle of chips
It's the unexpected
It's the business deal
It's compiler flags
'Til the wafers are done
In the fab of choice...
In the circle
The circle of chips
Dell has long been (the)... market leader
Done with Intel's marketing fees
But Opteron was just too cool
Dell servers... to use AMD!
XBox: IBM over Intel.
What is next? I just cannot tell.
But if I could dream
The Linux dream...
Oh, please, oh, please... build a desktop with Cell!
[refrain]
...They be just like the No-OS computers which somehow cost more than the same spec machine with Windows. Nobody will buy them becuase they'll cost more than an Intel box, and Dell will say, "See... We knew nobody would buy them." And if people do buy them, Dell will love it becuase they'll be making a higher profit than on an Intel box.
A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything.
My Sysadmin Blog
There's a lot of chatter in this thread about this being little more than a PR stunt with limited sales value to AMD. At face value, this is true; however, consider the bigger picture. This news validates AMD's product -- Dell saying that a product is good is much better for AMD than Dell saying that "there's no demand" as was the case not that long ago. Remember, Dell is using this for their most expensive servers -- that's nothing to sneeze at. Heck, the profit for AMD for 4x800 series Opterons is the probably close to the profit that Intel gets from 100 Celerons. AMD probably has a gross margin of close to $1000 on those 800 series Opterons, versus maybe $20-50 for the Celerons.
Dell's not announcing anything lower than the four cpu servers, but given the situation, Dell has no choice but to take baby steps. We're talking about huge volumes of chips in Dell's mainstream lines, so a little caution is reasonable! Nevertheless, now that Dell uses AMD chips, the next guessing game becomes "How long until their customers force Dell to get AMD 2-way servers (or maybe 64bit laptops)?". I'm thinking less than a year. They've already taken the hardest step of ditching the exclusivity with Intel. There's no real reason to hold back now.
Why is Intel so stupid when it comes to power consumption for server processors?
Was is the operative word - the stuff coming out this summer is actually pretty decent.
But to answer your question - Marketing. Somebody in the DotCom era let the Marketing Department take ahold of engineering. MegaHertz, MegaHertz, MegaHertz were all that mattered. So you get the NetBurst strategy, very deep pipelines, awful prediction miss penalties, and 'who cares about power?'.
So customers like you went elsewhere. In droves.
Meanwhile some engineers in Isreal kept working on the Pentium III which became the Pentium M which is now being used for the modern crop.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's about damn time Dellfuckturds.
Remember, PC = x86 compatible
PC = "Personal Computer".
These happened to exist long before the x86 series of processors and it PCs will continue to exist long afterward.
Its just a sad coincidence that most PCs lately are using x86 processors....
Here I am wondering what's the reverse of sellout? Selldowns!
Truth is, I doubt Dell is so unprepared that it will take them 6 months to ship their first AMD system. I would expect them to have had running AMD systems in their labs all along, and could ship tomorrow if they wanted to. This could be a Stalking Horse for them, a system intended to fail so that they can say, "See, we offered AMD and nobody bought." If Dell was selling AMD desktops at a price comensurate with the relative cost of the AMD chip compared to the Intel equivalent, I'd own at least one already.
Dell says they're listening to what their customers want, but they're not! Or at least not acting on it afterwards.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Back in '99, AMD chips were found on laptops and whatnot, but they never really took off. They marketed their chips as a "value-priced" alternative to Intel (bullet train commercials mentioned "As fast as intel but cheaper"). Fast forward to today, where AMD abandoned their value brand (Duron, which they recently replaced with Sempron) and invented a new brand for their flagship chip (Opteron). AMD has gone from trying to compete in the Kia/Hyundai marketplace to competing in the Toyota/Lexus one -- rather than price being their selling point, they're focusing on quality (which, to be fair, they've had for quite a while. Again, this is just marketing.)
People bemoan the lack of AMD in the server/laptop Dell space but consider what this looks like to anyone buying from Dell: "You can either buy these cheap but 'good enough' Intel servers, or you can upgrade and buy this premium AMD box". In the end, people prefer switching to a "higher quality" brand rather than a "price aware" brand: isn't it hard to defend taking anyone to McDonald's when there's a much better but slightly more expensive restaurant next door?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Cheesy Movie Night
CONAN: Triumph, what do you think about us filming here in L.A.?
/paraphrased
TRIUMPH: Yes, yes, I don't see what the big deal is. I mean, it's like me rolling one of my poops from the living room to the den.
If you must buy Dell check out the new Precision workstations (don't know the number) that will be based on the new Intel microarchitecture Woodcrest processors. These are much faster than the AMD Opterons...
While you're correct that greater-than-two-socket mobos require 8xx Opterons instead of 2xx ones, you're not quite correct with regards to pricing. The price differential for an Opteron 8xx versus a Xeon MP is rather substantial. For example, an Opteron 880 2.4GHz dual core chip is listed on pricewatch for $1,349. A Xeon MP 3.66GHz w/ 1MB of L2 goes for $1,799.00 -- and that's for a single-core part. Doing some quick math, we find that a four-socket setup of 880 Opterons (eight cores total) would cost you $5,396. You could get four Xeon MP's for $7,196, but that would yield you only four cores and much, much lower performance. You could go with an eight-way Xeon MP setup if you can find one, but that would cost $14,392, not to mention the amazing cost and scarcity of eight-way mobos. That's a $9,000 price premium for Intel.
Switching to dual-core Xeon MP's helps a bit, but not a lot. A dual-core 3GHz Xeon MP (2x 2MB L2 cache) sets you back $3,501 per chip. Getting four of them brings the tab to $14,004. So you save about $400 over getting eight single-core Xeon MP's, and you'd probably save about $1,000-$2,000 on the motherboard. You're still more than double the cost of the Opteron 8xx setup, and no matter how you slice it, a 3GHz Xeon core on a 667MHz system bus has difficulty competing with a 2.4GHz Opteron core on a 1GHz HyperTransport bus.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People always talk about how AMD doesn't have the capacity to supply the world with chips. Why can't AMD just outsource the manufacturing if their demand is greater? I heard someone say that AMD just now got the capacity to supply DELL with chips but is this true? Thanks for any help.
The Itanium is just not as impressive as it once was, and it's rapidly being made redundant by improvfements in the x86 world. For example, your specs:
62, 99, and 130 Watts, and check out the new memory bandwidth numbers: 10.6 GB/sec.
Don't tell the real story. Yes, this is true, you can get an Itanium 2 processor that doesn't top 62w, but that requires you to purchase one of the LV line, which comes with only a 400 MHz FSB (maximum bandwidth of only 12.8 GB/s), and a maximum speed of 1.3 GHz. It is also limited to 3MB onboard cache.
See, the problem is the architecture is REALLY cache hungry, more-so than the x86 architecture, and it really needs a huge cache and high-bandwidth memory. The EPIC architecture itself has a much larger instruction size then x86 (41-bit versus [average] 24-bit). The Itanium 2 lacks a branch predictor, which means it executes both podssible directions of the branch, and this can thrash even larger caches. The Itanium 2 also doesn't support out-of-order execution, so if it encounters a cache miss, performance suffers.
Thanks to this, the Itanium, a relatively simple processor, nedds an astoundly expensive cache and high-bandwidth memory to function well. Unfortunately, this means that the 1.5-3MB cache modes will not perform NEARLY as well as their high-end 6MB or 9MB cache brothers. Have a look at these benchmarks...the 1.3 GHz, 3MB cache processor just matches the (much cheaper) 2.2 GHz Opteron in FP, the same processor available in 55w TDP. It also performs much worse than the 4MB and 6MB cache models, clock-for-clock.
For example, the 1.4 GHz Itanium 2 processor, clocked only 8% faster, has 18% better performance due to the 4MB cache. The 1.5 Ghz Itanium 2, clocked only 15% faster, has 34% better performance due to the massive 6MB cache. So, you see the sweetspot for the Itanium 2 lies somewhere in the range of 4-6MB cache. Unfortunately, these chips are only available through the (VERY expensive, and VERY power-hungry) Multi-Processor (MP) line.
Kinda makes you wonder why anyone uses Itanium anymore. The Opteron has bested the Itanium's impressive bus and memory bandwidth, not by offering higher peak bandwidth, but by providing better efficiency. Thanks to the embedded, low-latency memory controller, the Opteron gets a lot more bandwidth out of its dual-channel DDR-400 in real-world situations than the Itanium can out of its dual-channel DDR2-667.
By next year, K8L Opterons will not only offer the same peak bandwidth numbers (10.6 GB/s using DDR2-667), they will also have double the vector and floating-point power of previous Opterons. Intel's Core 2-based server parts will also kick the Itanium's ass, making the Itanium redundant. Don't you love progress?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Interesting that Dell has chosen to use AMD chips on there High-end/High-performance machines. That is speaking volumes as to the quality of the AMD products. It is only a matter of time before they see the customer satisfaction rate sky-rocket and begin using the technology on there Desktop and Laptop machines. Then they can sell products even cheaper than they already do, which in turn will put me out of business. But, I am still happy for AMD.
I've been trying to convince Dell for six years to move to AMD. The response they always give is that Intel chips are more reliable. The truth is, Intel's wallet is more reliable giving Dell discounts! :) I'd really like to see Dell ship more Linux servers too. Maybe this is our chance!
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Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!