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AMD Businesses Hardware

Dell May Try AMD Chips For Some Servers 212

Posted by timothy from the weeeeeellll-let-me-think-it-over dept.
LarsWestergren writes "According to InfoWorld, Dell may be close to adopting AMD processors. Don't get your hopes up too early though. It is mainly for servers (and possibly "gaming"?) since AMD doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell with enough processors for the desktop. Furthermore, Dell have said similar things before, possibly to put pressure on Intel and get better deals from them. Still, this is definitely a PR win for AMD." Intel, though, has a lot more ad dollars to contribute.
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Dell May Try AMD Chips For Some Servers More

Dell May Try AMD Chips For Some Servers

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  • They can either switch to AMD and get better processors, or threaten to switch and negotiate a better deal with Intel -- either way, Dell wins and Intel loses.

    • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nice job modding up for someone saying the exact same thing as the post.

    • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:5, Interesting)

      by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) * on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:26AM (#10805498) Homepage
      I have a love-hate relationship with Dell.

      They sell both really solid machines (400SC?) and utter shitpiece machines (600SC). Sometimes you get a good deal and sometimes the stupid thing just crashes when you put 2 or more PCI cards in it.

      Their only saving grace is that once you figure out the right machine for your needs, they usually keep selling them for a while so you can buy another one when you need it.

      Dell obviously has a clue when it comes to efficient just-in-time manufacturing, but they're way out of touch with how end users and businesses use PCs. Their web site is a joke. It's surprising how hard it is for them, with all the resources at their disposal, to get it right.

      When will a PC mfr get it right?

      • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:5, Insightful)

        by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:09AM (#10805594) Homepage
        Their website sucks, true, but they aren't alone in this. I can't think of a single business website that has a decent interface, they all universally suck.

        It's like it's a fucking game with the web developers: How hard can I make it to hide the most useful shit from the end user. It's always some thing new. If I want a phone number, say, for Fed Ex, for example, I spend a good couple minutes dicking around on their site before calling information.

        Anyway, Dell is my new favorite computer company. They sell the best machines and have the best support I've dealt with recently ( old Compaq customer here ). When something does break, they have a replacement part on my door step the next day, or if it's critical, the same day. And I don't pay a fucking dime for that service, it's included.
        • Fed ex is 1-800-gofedex

          hit zero immediatly and you get an operator.

          Do not demean yourself to saying numbers to a machine.

        • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Reivec ( 607341 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:39AM (#10805665)
          If it is critical? You mean if you buy 4 hour service. I work at Dell, we can't send stuff same day just because it is important, you have to have the right kind of contract. That said, I think our support is pretty damn good (at least on the business side). I can't say that every single tech there is top notch, but they give me a good deal of control over how to resolve an issue and send out parts without needing to get approvals etc. I honestly don't see how we make money given the low ass margins on the systems.
          • I didn't buy the four hour service. I bought an optiplex g270 ( er, or something ), didn't get any extra warrenty. Mobo went out, and it was really the only intel chipset board we had that could handle the xray stuff we were doing. After explaining that to the tech, I got the part by about 4pm that day ( I called in at 8am ).

            Above and beyond what they could have done. I will stick with Dell from this point forward.

          • I'd say that Dell makes money in the same way that car insurance companies do. Dell isn't really in the business of selling machines, that's what it started out as, and that's what their business entails... but Dell is more of a computer-insurance company. The fact that you have to buy the computer first in order to buy the insurance policy is a bene.

            The corporate support is where the big bucks are. If you get seventy companies to sign on, and only twenty of them really require support, you've made a k

        • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:4, Informative)

          by boaworm ( 180781 ) <boaworm@gmail.com> on Saturday November 13, 2004 @05:16AM (#10805967) Homepage Journal
          I can't think of a single business website that has a decent interface, they all universally suck.
          apple.com [apple.com] is very nice, imho. It is

          Good looking (imho)

          Light weight (for the times when you are not on broadband, support sites for instance is merely text)

          Easilly navigated (you can often guess the url path, like www.apple.com/ipod, /hardware /store etc)

          It sell's Apple computers! (hihi)

          • Except that I have yet to find the mystical "specials" page, where you can buy an Apple computer for something for less than $799.
        • We got seriously tired of the crappy machines they were sending us, and our boss moved us to Omnipro, but Gateway has a pretty good website. Unfortunately, their products are about as hit and miss as Dell's. The only machines we have that have been truly reliable have been E-1200 systems, which are a celery 366 (IIRC) that maxes out at like 256MB ram and which have a riser card in them for the ultimate in annoyance. Regardless their phone number is on the front page, clicking support takes you to a page tha

      • Re:Win-win situation for Dell (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nonesuch ( 90847 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @03:19AM (#10805752) Homepage Journal
        I have a love-hate relationship with Dell.

        They sell both really solid machines (400SC?) and utter shitpiece machines (600SC). Sometimes you get a good deal and sometimes the stupid thing just crashes when you put 2 or more PCI cards in it.

        Their only saving grace is that once you figure out the right machine for your needs, they usually keep selling them for a while so you can buy another one when you need it.

        The issue I have with Dell is that they will change out a couple of the chipsets on a machine, but keep selling them under the exact same model number, and just ship updated Windows drivers for the new chips.

        This is fine, assuming you are running windows on the machine in question.

        Rather than wait for Dell to make up their mind about AMD chips, we are switching to Opteron-powered Sunfire servers.

        • Dell is possibly _not_ considering selling AMD machines because Sun already makes the best Opteron-based workstations and servers for a decent price.
          It'd be hard to beat that.
          Only if they feel the demand is there with respect to their existing partners and big contract customers.

          They might be able to swing the Semperon/AMD64 chips in the high-end desktop and laptop market, however.
      • If what you said is right for Dell, being the market leader, what is there to expect from HP, IBM, Gateway et.al.?!!!!

        You get what you paid for, and then some. If Dell likes you I bet you will have a much better experience.

        My 0.02
      • The big reasons we pick Dell when ordering machines:

        - 3 year warranty, with options for 4 hour service

        (Useful for cases where I don't want to be the support tech for a particular person.)
        - a website that lets me play with the configuration before ordering with transparent pricing

        (A lot of companies get the website portion wrong. They'll let you configure your system, but won't tell you how much more/less the system will cost as you change a particular item. Dell's site does it properly, showing yo
    • I highly doubt that Dell will start using any AMD chips for a while yet. Why? Because Dell is by far the largest Intel customer, and they get (and deserve) the best pricing for Intel chips. Plus, they receive large subsidies for advertising Intel only product lines.

      Selling any AMD chips would threaten their pricing arrangements with Intel. Since Dell sells billions of dollars of CPUs per quarter, even a half a percent rise in Intel chip prices amounts to 10's of millions of dollars in CPU costs per ye
      • Note they said on their servers not their workstation/home computers. They have seen the writing on the wall with regards to the Itaniam series not being supported by MS and their 2k3 cluster edition. Chances are they told Intel to suck it and that they would only allow inroads with the AMD in their server line. When you are the number one computer seller you have to have some perks
    • Or Intel can just say, go ahead and use AMD. And you will loose all those special prices and discounts we give you, so you will be much less competetive than you are now.
    • Several weeks ago in an article interviewing a Dell exectutive, the guy stated that Dell wasn't receiving all that many requests for Opteron servers or AMD64 machines. He said the pressure wasn't all that great to offer AMD in their product line. Well, since Dell's customers already KNOW that Dell doesn't sell AMD processor based computers, do you think that maybe those customers aren't even asking for opteron servers, and are just automatically going to HP or other vendor who does? It's kind of a self-f

  • For Real This Time? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkmeridian ( 119044 ) <william.chuang@NOSPaM.gmail.com> on Saturday November 13, 2004 @12:58AM (#10805401) Homepage
    Microsoft is supporting the AMD 64 extensions. Dell probably wants to be on the MS rather than Intel side of things since there is no (real) alternative to Windows.

    Anyway, this is server-side only. CEO Rollins says, "If we basically sucked up all of AMD's [manufacturing] capacity it would not be enough. They don't have enough capacity for us to use them on the desktop. For us, fundamentally, AMD is much more interesting in the server, workstation or gaming arenas."

    The AMD 64 chips also seem to run cooler. This would be majorly helpful, one thinks, then the high clockspeed Intels in a server farm situation. And the 64 bit allows more RAM to be addressed. Yep. Server.

  • Dell is just speculating, like they did with Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vision33r ( 829872 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:03AM (#10805418)
    Unforuntately, Dell is in bed too long with Intel for them to add AMD to their productline. Not to mention, the corporations still count server performance by numbers marketing numbers like GHZ and AMD's processor power ratings maybe too low to be advertised correctly.
    • The problem is that customers, even if it's a small minority, are starting to switch. Regardless of Dell's marketing practices.

      Intel won't have an answer for Opterons until 2006 or so. Until then, I think Dell just expects them to eat the loss.

      As a backup, they probably are willing to start selling Opterons. I don't think they'll lose the special pricing deal with Intel if they do that, simply because there's no one else to buy the chips if Dell doesn't want them. Even if the desktop systems were partiall

    • Re:Dell is just speculating, like they did with Li (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nierd ( 830089 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:22AM (#10805621)
      Actually I am a Network Engineer for a large multi-hospital system. I can tell you with over 1000 servers in our farm... MHZ is NOT the issue for servers.. 1. Is it reliable? 2. Does it have support for failover/hotswap 3. Does it run the software. 4. Does it meat budget requirements for the system and project? Those are the questions asked - if you knew anything about the real server marked you would understand that servers are typically several generations behind the latest and greatest. We still have servers in production that are P2 400 Mhz machines (dual processor) that run major medical systems that support over 400 users - these systems require 24/7 uptime and typically run at 99.96 % uptime (this is with windows NT 4.0) Don't even ask about the unix systems... IBM hardware that is ancient that supports over 1000 users - talking about 66mhz procs and such. MHZ is definatly not what we look at.
      • I'll have to chime in. It's not just the corperate space with uptime is king. I work in the internet facing arena and the MHZ is a sales joke. We still have people on P2's because they have no need to migrate or desire because the system have been up and running for YEARS with the only thing affecting Unix server uptime is kernel upgrades. Take a Dual proc PII box with raid and hot swap everything and there isn't much to turn it off for. Granted being internet facing we go for what the customer demand

  • Intel Inside :-) (Score:5, Funny)

    by muditgarg ( 829569 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:04AM (#10805423)
    AMD ofice has a grave in the front lawn saying Intel Inside . Looks like finally its gonna come true
    • From this article [theregister.co.uk]:

      The former Cyrix site in Richardson, Texas... we visited the site and met ebullient Jerry Rogers, the ex-CEO, who... proudly showed us round the property, which sported a mock gravestone marked "Intel Inside RIP" in the reception area....

      So ,unless AMD bought the famed gravestone and has decided to sport it at their offices now (and I found no evidence to suggest this) the parent might be mistaken.

      Also from the article: Cyrix, of course, was acquired by Via... who, it seems, faced some challenges netween their engineering and their business sectors after the acquisition. But, then again, when have these sorts of differences ever been news?

  • Look at the stock prices over the last year... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mustang Matt ( 133426 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:08AM (#10805434)
    I don't know if it's any indicator, but Intel and AMD are within $3 USD of each other.

    I bought AMD long long ago and they split. I'm really glad I went that route!

  • HP already is (Score:5, Informative)

    by aqua ( 3874 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:09AM (#10805441)
    Not that I'm fond of them as a company or anything, but my employer buys thousands of HP's servers, and HP has been selling Opteron-based servers [hp.com] (e.g.) for some while now. Even if AMD never achieved sufficient penetration with ia32, there's some hope that they'll gain some of the ephermeral credibility by being first to market with a workable ia32-compatible 64-bit architecture.

  • So that is why . . . (Score:3, Informative)

    by dgrgich ( 179442 ) * <drew@grgich . o rg> on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:22AM (#10805479)
    . . . AMD's stock jumped so crazy today!
    • They've been suffering from a few 'upgrades' from major stock brokerages the last couple of days. No real new tecnical news, though. Most of us /. crowd have known that AMD has a definitive performance advantage with the AMD64 and opteron processors that Intel has pretty much acknowledged they will be unable to respond to for at least another year and a quarter. That's an eternity as far as the stock market is concerned.

      AMD is in the position now to dictate prices on it's AMD64 and opteron chips. This i
  • Dell makes cheap PC's Just In Time and throws money at advertising. Dell will it's mostly computer illiterate swarms it's just as fast as the Intel equivilant and maybe promote AMD over Intel if it can make a few more dollars.

  • Didn't AMD just license a second source? (Score:3, Informative)

    by BlueBiker ( 690984 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @01:30AM (#10805509)
    I'd hope this would bolster their ability to supply the larger OEMs.

  • Beginning of the end for Intel? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:21AM (#10805618)
    I remember seeing a speech by Andy Grove about Intel's business model. Basically that intel puts huge investment and thus huge risk into each new processor version and that failure was not an option as it would destroy the companies ability to continue innovating.

    Well, here we are today with this story about Dell, and then there's the story about Microsoft not supporting Itanium, and then theres the news that Intel stopped development on the 4ghz processors (essentially admitting failure of their technology model). The real nail in the coffin is that AMDs processors are not only cheaper, but they are faster and run cooler.

    In the bigger picture, this is the next step in the commodization of computers. This process is making them cheap as toilet paper, but it is also a harbinger of end of rapid innovation and perhaps even the end of moores law. This should be expected as its the natural progression of any product.

    Once Intel in marginalized, Microsoft must be soon to follow?

    • Re:Beginning of the end for Intel? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CaptainPinko ( 753849 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:41AM (#10805670)
      Once Intel in marginalized, Microsoft must be soon to follow?

      No, AMD becomes the next Intel, geeks move onto Transmeta as AMD's prices rise. Eventually, Transmeta (or some other corp.) triumphs when AMD dies. Windows stays.

      Really, if Windows is to die then either it is going be the slow nibbling we may be seeing now from Linux JDS et al or when a new architecture comes out that is faster *and* cheaper than x86 and we switch to it's OS. The death of one particular x86 vendor matters not to Microsoft. I still wouldn't rule Intel out. Or matter accurately: I'd rule them out except they still have one line left and it actually fairly succesful: Pentium M. Watch Intel sell the rest of the farm and any grandmother it can find to pump money into this project's R&D to make it a real killer.
      • Or matter accurately: I'd rule them out except they still have one line left and it actually fairly succesful: Pentium M.

        Isn't it all the desktop and low end server lines that are still good for them? Uh, Intel isn't trailing that much in performance to count it out and dead, they still have a a fast chip (folks, being 5% slower on average doesn't mean it is useless), just not as quite as fast, and they still have a significant market share advantage to carry them to the next CPU generation.

        IIRC, Pent
        • The irony in this is that intel made it's own bed. Imagine a marketing ploy to keep them on top turns out to bite them later down the raod. I am somewhat of a fan of the -m processors as well as AMD's.

          I bet they are going to start thinking 10 years down the road when making marketing statments now. This could be somethign else holding them back. Imagine if they went with AMD's marketing and basicaly stated more for less but acted like it was some revolutionary idea they discovered that made it so much bett
        • Intel has basically two modes of operation that we've seen so far. The first is to provide a slightly superior product at a greatly increased price. The second is when they are running scared, and they provide a slightly inferior product at only a slightly increased price. Note that either way you get a shitty deal with intel. intel has lowered their prices recently with the threat of AMD dominance but it is still true that AMD has a better price-performance ratio than intel. If intel lowers their prices (t
    • In the bigger picture, this is the next step in the commodization of computers. This process is making them cheap as toilet paper [...]

      And you can run Windows on them to match the strength of toilet paper.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @02:59AM (#10805717)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • For such a niche market as, say, gaming PCs, it makes some sense though. AMD chips are currently better in the majority of games out right now. Dell could introduce a line, call it something like Dell OMG Gamer++, charge a ridiculous amount, and they'd get an extra profit margin, since the AMD chips are cheaper. And it would have the same effect as the rumors you describe; they could always say to Intel, "Well, we've had a lot of interest in the OMG Gamer++..." and get a lower price that way.

  • It's about time... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Karora ( 214807 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @03:11AM (#10805736) Homepage


    We have switched completely to Opteron for our gruntier servers now, and it seems good. Certainly the em64t processors don't rate in comparison.

    Unfortunately for Dell this has meant that they only got orders for the low-end gear from us for the last 12 months, so their failure has forced us to experience some of their opposition...

  • Intel is going to win on this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ehwaz003 ( 830177 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @04:38AM (#10805901) Homepage
    Despite what most have posted, Intel is going to win out of this.
    Dell queries AMD and AMD replies, while Dell secretly hopes that Intel is going to jump on this and lower their prices for CPU's, so that Dell can sell the PC's at the same price, but get more profit out of them.
    So Dell should be the winner, right?

    Well, no...
    Since Intel sees what Dell is up to, it plays the game and acts like it's totally ignorant. It gives new features and lower prices for the CPU's, but therefore it's going to need Intel chipsets and motherboards...
    You can see what this is going to cause?
    Chipset and Intel motherboard prices will rise and I'm not sure Intel is going to lower their CPU prices that much either.
    It's simply enough for them to advertise "Now, Intel CPU's got better, faster and cheaper".
    But when the whole media campaign is over, Intel has revenue from it's motherboard and chipsets, while raising the CPU price again.

    Who is losing now???

  • Dell have a problem. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MROD ( 101561 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @04:51AM (#10805931) Homepage
    Dell have a problem in the HPC/multi-processor server market. The latest generation of Xeons, the EM64T 64bit capable x86 class processors can only currently go 2 way as Intel don't actually produce a 4 way chipset for these processors yet. Not only this but because the EM64T processors share a memory bus they soon run out of bandwidth.

    This is a real problem for Dell as they can't produce machines with large, flat memory architectures with more than 2 processors, and even then the HPC (High Performance Computing) crowd are just laughing that their machines because of the price and memory bottleneck.

    Dell are now seeing large cluster purchases abandoning them for other companies who can supply fat nodes which 16-32GB of RAM and 4 processors which have copious amounts of memory bandwidth 'cos of the cunning way AMD built the Opterons.

    This is why, I believe, Dell are looking at adding AMD to their line. It may also be a cynical move to get Intel to do something but in the cluster space Intel's processors produce too much heat and just can't do 4 way+big memory and Dell are hurting.

  • Will AMD be shooting itself in the foot again? (Score:4, Informative)

    by danalien ( 545655 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @06:21AM (#10806076) Homepage
    • AMD doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to supply Dell with enough processors for the desktop.

    This *kinda* goes hand-in-hand with my earlier rejected story I tried to submit:
    • Subject: Will AMD be shooting itself in the foot again?

    • theinquirer.net [theinquirer.net] 1st reported [theinquirer.net] that AMD in a bold move " has signed a deal with Chartered Semiconductor - a Singapore foundry - to make 64-bit processors under licence". Then contituned to elaborate on the story, that " AMD move to Chartered is insurance policy [theinquirer.net] ", where they take help from Nathan Brookwood (senior chip analyst at Insight64.com [insight64.com]) totry to make sense of the move.

  • What I detest about Intel (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Saturday November 13, 2004 @07:17AM (#10806174)
    Intel, though, has a lot more ad dollars to contribute.

    Am I the only one who cringes everytime he hears the word "Intel" in an ad, because you just know that their stupid jingle will follow? After years of being subjected to dah-dah-DAH-dah in just about every single ad for a laptop or a computer on TV, this is reason enough to buy AMD.

    Dear Intel ad people, there is such a thing as overdoing things. Why don't you quit the "repeats are everything" theory and switch to the "let's be cool and funny" version? Works for Apple anytime.

    Until then, I'm saving for my dual Opteron system. You can take your dah-dah-DAH-dah and...

  • It's amazing how many people think that AMD chips are somehow sub-par simply because they aren't supported by popular vendors like Dell and Gateway. Even some of the more advanced computer users I encounter seem to believe that AMD chips will be "more buggy" or slower than Intel chips. AMD has changed a lot since the introduction of the K7, and ever since then I've felt they've been at least a couple steps ahead of Intel when it comes to CPU performance and technology. Intel made some pretty big mistakes

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