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Dell to use AMD Chips in Desktop PCs
bain writes "MarketWatch reports that Dell has decided to use AMD chips in its Dimension desktops due next month. The move to use AMD chips signals a break from its long standing reliance on Intel chips. The information slipped out of Dell's quarterly earnings report." From the article: "Before the announcement, which had been speculated in the financial community and the press, Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone wrote in a research note: 'It should have a negative impact on Intel and it could be a large offset to the expected benefits from Intel's restructuring efforts.' AMD, which has become a more formidable competitor to Intel, has been expanding its manufacturing capacity, a sign that it expects to be shipping more chips. Its chief goal is to put itself in position to supply 33% of the global microprocessor market by 2008. "
Well we have already been seeing some huge innovations. Chip innovations stumbled for a few years for two reasons. Intel had a virtual monopoly, chips were reaching their theoretical speed limit and Intel didn't seem to see anyway to improve them except ramping up the Ghz and putting a bigger heatsink on it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the new intel processors cheaper, faster, and use less power than AMD at this point??? I must be missing something.
But I'm with you - I banned the purchase of Dell machines in our company due to horrible quality and horrible customer service.
Intel has already fought back, by (attempting) to phase out the NetBurst architecture. It's unlikely that we'll see any significant Intel innovations any time soon, since the duration of R&D cycles seems to be 3-4 months.
AMD's offerings probably won't significantly change either, since the 4x4 architecture it's been touting is irrelevant in the low-end desktop market.
Unfortunately, innovation doesn't occur on-demand.
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Considering the new Intel chips coming out now (Core 2 Duo) seem to be destorying AMD performance wise, this would seem to be a price based decision on Dell's part. They are (for the most part) a discount hardware vendor so the recent, aggressive price cuts from AMD must have been too appealing for them to ignore.
Also, ever since they introduced AMD on some of their servers it's seemed only a matter of time before that relatioship transfered to their desktop offerings. I would imagine, though, that their notebook lines will continue to use Intel as Intel continues to have the (perceived?) lead in that market.
Although the article mentioned that AMD is increasing its capacity to produce chips, I have to wonder how supplying Dell is going to impact the little guy. Are there enough chips to go around for everyone? Will NewEgg and others start having shortages? The Enthusiast has always been in AMD's corner. With Intel releasing its new processors that run circles around AMD offerings and the potential for there to be shortages in the after-market, I have to wonder if AMD is trading one customer base for another.
I hope the progress for AMD will now be volume -> cash -> more R&D - > better products.
Over the years, I've gotten the vague feeling that AMD has better engineers who can do more with less. I hope the new volume will not only allow AMD to gear up the foundries, but all expand their R&D. I don't know the real figures, but I've always suspected the Intel has a lot more money to spend on research and development, and they still are only now starting to pull ahead on performance. I hope this deal will give AMD enough money to ramp up their R&D.
If AMD could be competative with a smaller program, consider what the should be able to do with more money.
The more I think about it, the more it has to do with beating HP and Gateway back down. HP (Compaq) and Gateway (eMachines) made quite a bit by embracing AMD in the last year after years of trying to be a Dell copycat by being Intel only. Of course, the question is whether it was actually the usage of AMD that made the difference or just the fact that there's still quite a lot of people who would still buy at retail stores (+ the low price).
I wouldn't put it past other manufacturers to also try this, thinking that they can make more extra money selling both types of systems, rather than save a few bucks per CPU being exclusive, under contract.
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I wonder when AMD found out about this from Dell -- I would guess a few months ago. I never remember AMD being very big on advertising, which to me was a good thing because it (hopefully) meant that the kind of money Intel was spending on silly Blue Man Group commercials was instead going towards better chips at AMD (R&D, QA, etc). But just in the last month or two, I've seen AMD ads springing up in NYC and Philadelphia on billboards and bus stops, probably trying to increase brand recognition. I hope it works -- a balanced market share would logically seem to be the best driving force behind quality chip development from both camps.
I disagree. What's happened with Dell is that their strategy was based around having the most efficient operations. They were able to pass savings to the consumer on demand due to their tremendous supply chain and just in time capabilities. Sadly, this strategy is imitable - your competitors are bound to catch up. (Now HP does this too now)
Another big blow to them was the whole overseas support thing. Imagine hordes of people having problems with defects, bugs and spyware trying to get good support from call centers. My personal example is this. I had a shipping error on a projector that I bought in 2003. I finally gave up and it wasn't until I provided feedback to a survey that I received that I was connected to a US-based supervisor that paved the way for the problem resolution.
Time spent - 4+ months.
This whole Intel/AMD processor deal is a way to take control away from the processor suppliers.
Is this the cause or effect of the Intel-Apple deal? Or totally unrelated?
Could it have been Dell trying to use AMD to haggle for lower prices from Intel and taking it a bit too far, and Apple seizing the opportunity to strike a deal with Intel?
And next thing you know, Apple gets a Dell-style deal from Intel, and Dell ends up with "humpty dumpty" on its face.
IBM and HP might now be having a moment of schadenfreude...
As for AMD's quad cores saving them, I don't see any significant core changes. No core changes = just the usual scaling = not going to beat Core 2 Duo or Woodcrest - which are now better per GHz and faster overall.
Maybe AMD stuff will win for 8 way servers (4 socket x 2 cores, or 8 socket), but the market for 8 way is pretty small at the moment.
As for 2 socket x 4 cores, AFAIK quad core means the 4 cores will share the socket's memory, so I don't see how that is going to be much better than Intel.
But what you're missing is that hyperthreading often slows things down, although I honestly have no idea why. Still, the P4 is a pile of crap. The pipeline is miles long - it's even got "twiddle my thumbs" stages, known as drive stages, to simply wait for signal propagation. Don't be waiting, be working damn it. This is what chasing the maximum clock rate to the exclusion of new, intelligent design gets you - a pile of shit.
In fact this is the only reason hyperthreading helps at all. The P4's pipeline is so long that even an excellent branch predictor (many people have claimed that the P4's is great) is simply not going to keep you from having huge periods of time where the processor is underutilized due to misprediction. Thus, in order to use some of that unused capacity of the functional units, we get hyperthreading.
Intel has not only given us two cores finally, but they've also stepped back and used more efficient cores, which is what makes them a credible threat to AMD's expansion.
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I don't really want to speculate on the effects of the lawsuit. It will in any event be decided by the facts gathered in discovery on past behavior, and even if Intel thinks they may lose it would make sense to continue leveraging their monetary advantage as long as possible.
But I agree that Intel bribes definitely are relevent. Dell has threatened to sell AMD in the past, almost certainly as a way to keep Intel on their toes and giving freely from their coffers. Dell's decision to switch would have to take into account the loss of that money, meaning either there's less of it than before, loss of customer business outweighs that money, or some combination of both.
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But what you're missing is that hyperthreading often slows things down, although I honestly have no idea why.
I can't say for certain, but I have some educated guesses. Basically, resource sharing and resource splitting.
Resources like the L1 data cache are shared. If your two threads have working sets that fit in the l1 cache, then a 'traditional' time-slicing approach allows each thread to work entirely out of the cache. If you run them both at the same time, then they share the cache and neither can fit all its data in the l1 and you get l1/l2 cache thrashing so each thread is running substantially slower, less than half the speed so you don't make it up by running two threads. If only one thread is making much use of the cache, though, this is okay.
Other resources are split, like schedulers and load/store queues, so that half is dedicated to one thread and half to the other. This makes dealing with multithreading easier, but it puts a hard limit on the amount of the resource either thread can use. I think this is why for single-threaded benchmarks disabling hyperthreading made it run faster -- the split resources were no longer split, so the single thread got maximum utilization. I think this is something that was improved in later revs of P4, with fewer resources being split instead of shared, because it seems like the penalty for hyperthreading in single-threaded apps went down.
Still, the P4 is a pile of crap... Intel has not only given us two cores finally, but they've also stepped back and used more efficient cores, which is what makes them a credible threat to AMD's expansion.
Good summary. I do find it funny that in order to compete with AMD's six-year-old design, Intel went back to what is at its roots a ten year old design -- and it's working. Heh.
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