AMD Hits Milestone in Server Market 215
DontClickHere writes "According to data from Mercury Research, AMD has finally cracked the 10% mark in x86 instruction set server CPUs. AMD's Chairman had hoped that their server sales would hit 10% at the end of 2004, but they had only reached 5.7%. Some of this gain can be attributed to AMD's introduction of dual core chips in April this year. With Intel only due to ship dual core chips for low end servers later this year, AMD has been handed a golden opportunity to take a larger share in the server market."
Re:Obligatory. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obligatory. (Score:5, Informative)
The Intel Itanium was released before the Athlon 64. You're thinking of EM64T-enabled Pentium 4s and Xeons.
But yeah, AMD got a lot of very good engineers from DEC.
Re:Laptops? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Main Reason (Score:5, Informative)
One might suspect Intel of dumping prices here, but it cannot be denied that this is an attractive offer.
Re:Main Reason (Score:3, Informative)
This is just plain wrong. Intel's 6XX series of Pentium4's has the EMT64 (aka, AMD64) instructions as well. Both AMD and Intel are selling 64-bit CPUs now.
-Erwos
Re:Main Reason (Score:5, Informative)
I'm actually an all AMD shop, except for a few workstations. The only intel machines in the institute are PIII 700's and 900's from before my time there and a set of 6 Dell Precicions 650's (running Debian.). (Which were also the fastest machines in the place 3 years ago when I started.)
Servers are all AMD MP's with a few AMD opterons rouding out the bunch. Workstations are dual MP's. Desktops are mostly Duron's through XP's .
Just bought a few 1u tyan machines. (amd opterons) and planning on building up a cluster in a few weeks with about 30 more.
AMD has won on the campus scene at least.
Oh, and the desktop machines in my house are all AMD except for a crappy compaq that my bro bought and an iBook g3.
Kind of funny. Can't believe they only have 10% right now. But it happens I guess.
Best,
Re:Laptops? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Main Reason (Score:3, Informative)
The difference is, intel's memory addressing on EM64T is weak by comparison (which has nothing to do with on die memory controllers)
Re:Laptops? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
In addition to this, AMD64 chips feature something called "Cool n Quiet." CnQ is basically a fancy name for intelligent dynamic clock scaling. Again, using my 3200+ as an example, when under full load, it runs at 2GHz @ 1.375V. However, when the computer's idling or under light loads (ie: most web browsing, word processing), the CPU drops down to 1GHz@1.0V. When the load's somewhere inbetween, the CPU scales up in 200MHz increments on the fly. It's actually kind of cool to watch happen in a clock speed/voltage monitor.
So the short answer - AMD's been ahead of Intel in this regard (on the desktop) for quite some time. Prescott took it from AMD being a bit cooler to there being no comparison whatsoever. Hope that helps.
Re:How can I compare.... (Score:3, Informative)
AMD made the first 100 MHZ 486 DX4 chips. This was at a time when the Pentium 75 was just entering the market and the 486 DX4 100 was both faster and cheaper. Throughout their history, AMD has always been able to deliver superior performance at slower clock speeds than Intel. They have also been cheaper to purchase. Whle I have always considered AMD CPU's to be economical, I also consider them to be superior chips to anything Intel produces.
I sell computers at Circuit City... (Score:2, Informative)
Sun sells Opteron based servers (Score:2, Informative)
AMD's NUMA support. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AMD's NUMA support. (Score:3, Informative)
A search on ibm.com does not give me a link to the document and neither does google. I did however find an IBM provided AMD vs XEON linpack-comparison benchmark ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/benchmarks/wp_L inpack_072905.pdf [ibm.com], but first benchmark (that I can't locate) was better.
It clearly shows the advantages of the AMDs NUMA architecture and also other factors.
NUMA is also available on some enterprise level IBM XEON servers like the x440, x445 and x460 (or the equivelent systems from Fujitsu Siemens or NEC). One thing that is important on these servers is that you should balance each CEC with the same amount of memory or it will greatly affect performance. AMD's NUMA technology is not affected as much as XEON on this (as the mentioned paper shows).