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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."
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.
They are initiating outsourcing of some production to Chartred.
I assume they planned in advance for this, since if the Dell deal didn't go through, they could cancel the Cartred deal without having tons of spare capacity on thier hands.
With 20/20 hindsight, looking at AMD's Chartred plans, it should have been pretty obvious that AMD had a big customer lined up. Too bad I didn't have that foresight, otherwise I could have made some good cash on AMD stock.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, you are wrong. Dell previously announced they were considering using AMD processors, which is widely assumed to have been a tactic in their negotiations with intel at the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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%").
If you keep track of the current offerings by Intel and AMD, you'll find that AMD chips are consistenly increasing their power consumption. Analyst mention "Presscot tendency" when they talk about this. Everybbody agrees it has to end - Intel is releasing a power-efficient arquitecture in a few months and while current AMD offerings are good, it just can't sit hpoing that intel isn't going to catch up, and it looks like the Core is that "catchup".
AMD has just released recently a low-power Athlon line - but it looks more like a patch than a semi-rearchitecture like the core is. This new low-power line will help AMD somewhat and the 65nm switch in december will help a bit too but they'll have to work hard if they don't want to became the "hell" in the humoristic comentaries in a few months.
My amd chip runs pretty cool anyway. I recently bought an Athlon64 X2 3800+ (2ghz dual core). It actually runs cooler than my nforce4 chipset under load (while playing games like oblivion). Of course I did replace the stock heatsink/fan with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro which has improved my cpu temperatures (paid $35 Canadian for the aftermarket cooler, and it's working amazing so far).
I'm running at stock speeds and voltages. Here are my temp readings while idle and after playing oblivion for 2 hours:
Idle: CPU: 30-33C Chipset: ~33C GPU: ~40C
Oblivion: CPU: 37-38C Chipset: 41-42C GPU: 50-56C
Of course, if I ran an instance of Prime95 torture test on each core, I would see cpu temperatures above 40C. But for what I use this computer for (gaming primarly), I never see the cpu go over 38C, which is pretty damn cool IMO (my old Dell P4 2.66ghz idles at 40C, higher than my load temps).
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