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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?
Of course Intel is coming back with some impressive new technology so the battle ahead looks good for us!
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.
Because no one cares that you took a bath in the stock market due to giving up on their favorite processor-selling corporation?
Now, if you had told us you dumped your stock because you assumed this was never going to happen or something, it would be on topic. And we'd all be laughing at you. More than we already are, I mean.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Itanic had far and away the best fp scores when it came out. If what you had to do was almost all fp math then the itanium made sense at the time, possibly even from a flops-per-watt standpoint. Today it's just a footnote to a sad joke.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Probably because they are only going to try to sell a very few AMD servers, and all for PR. I'd lay money that it's from a backroom deal with Intel.
Last year Dell started selling AMD CPUs. Boxed CPUs. Dell didn't make *ANY* computers those CPU's would fit in, but they offered the CPUs for sale. Why? It's incredably stupid to sell one upgrade component, that will only fit in your competitors machines, but not in your own, isn't it? So why? The only reason I can think of, is so that when Intel goes into court, and AMD tells the judge that Intel is using monopoly leverage on Dell so that Dell only uses Intel CPUs, Intel can say, 'well, Dell actually sells AMD CPU's as well'.
I can't imagine any other reason for doing that. But a judge will probably see through that quickly, so now we get a new announcement from Dell that they will build *some* AMD based servers. How many? Not many. Only at least 4-way servers. Why only 4-way servers when we the customers have been clamering for AMD for years? Because they can say they use AMD as well, without really touching Intel's market share. This one is all to make Intel look like less of a monopoly to the courts folks. Don't get your hopes up for AMD based Dell medium/small servers or desktops. It ain't gonna happen.
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.
Yeah, use Itanic and bust on an Intel chip and get modded up around here, but Itaniums are good chips, and they have a market, but a fairly small one right now. They have up to 1.3GHz models that use less power than a Xeon. They use 62 Watts of power. Current Opterons use anywhere from 62 Watts to 110 Watts.
You should probably call up Intel and tell them to fix their spec sheets, because they seem to think that they're selling Itaniums clocked from 900MHz to 1.66GHz and draw anywhere from 90-122W.
AMD, on the other hand, has dual core Opterons clocked at 2.2GHz and drawing only 55W.
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.