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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."
Hopefully AMD can keep up with production of their chips as I'm sure this will lead into desktop models not being far behind.
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:
Am I wrong, or is it not the first time that Dell announces such a move ?
... 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.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
It's possible to get noisy boxes from vendors who build them from commodity parts, too. Some guys from a Scala vendor (we bought infochannel from 'em) brought in a couple of 4U systems that were meant to be designer workstations, where you create content. One of them, the one in my office, has to be on all the time because part of our service contract states that we have to use their hardware, which of course is just commodity stuff, and the network manager software is on my system.
Now of course this is braindead anyway, because the network manager component uses very standard protocols and needs only bandwidth and some disk space, it needs practically no CPU. I have an old Network Engines RoadsterLX box with a Celery 466 that could do the job more than adequately... not that I'm suggesting we use it, but we could get a cheapier dell 1U box and throw that into the mix.
Instead, what we got was some cheap-ass commodity hardware in a 4U rack case that, I shit you not, is at least as loud as the Sun 4/260 that I used to sit at. For those who don't know, that's a 12-slot VME deskside case, about the size of six extra-large pizza boxes stacked on top of one another, then turned sideways. (Note that I'm talking about actual pizza boxes, not Sun "pizza boxes".) That machine's power supply was about the size of one of those little HP Brio celeron-based POS PCs, or an SGI Indigo.
So an ordinary Pentium IV, an nVidia card of some sort (PCI-E), three hard drives, and a DVD-ROM, and it's got damn near enough fans to lift off and fly away... WTF?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because servers need to be robust enough to run constantly for years without the fans wearing out with open vented cases to stay cool in a packed rack or comms room.
I too have a tower 'server' built from quiet standard kit which has run constantly over the past 6 years but it's gone through numerous PSUs & CPU fans as either the bearings go in the fans making them inefficient & noisy or a fan or PSU dies altogether.
I usually have to replace them about every year depending on how much I was bothered to spend on them at the time.
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
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.