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Itanium?
Don't you mean Itanic? I don't mean to be rude, because I don't know what you know, but I do have my doubts (about) Itanic based on the last couple of years following it's rise and decline.
IMO itanium is dead in the water, and is unwittingly the victim of progress beyond the imaginination of it's original creators. It's that simple.
Say hello to exponential creativity OUTSIDE the confines of Intc.
Say good bye to Itanium.
BTW
Who in god's name was the person that came up with that name. Was it launched with insider knowledge that it was doomed?
I agree with you. That's why I fear Intc. eom
Solaris 10 included?
Maybe you should embrace the old saying........
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
Just look at my last post, take a deep breath, and wait for the world to come to you. It will, I believe that with all my heart and soul.
winemkr
out
Important message from Sun re: Opteron and Starbucks
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/insidejack.html
How many Linux boxes does HP sell per year?
How many does Dell sell? How many are sold by all sellers? How many will move to 64bit?
Hmmm?
Just thinking out loud.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/040706/linux_dell_6.html
"Hewlett-Packard Co., announced this spring that it was broadening its desktop Linux offerings for corporate customers. On Tuesday, the company said it ships about 100,000 Linux desktops per quarter, with roughly half going to Asia."
Economy Set for Best Growth in 20 Years
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040706/D83LFTV00.html
Jul 6, 3:35 PM (ET)
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
WASHINGTON (AP) - The economy appears headed for a banner year despite a springtime spike in energy prices and a recent increase in interest rates.
In fact, many analysts are forecasting that the overall economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, will grow by 4.6 percent or better this year, the fastest in two decades.
There were strong 4.5 percent growth rates in 1997 and 1999, when Bill Clinton was president and the country was in the midst of a record 10-year expansion.
But if this year's growth ends up a bit faster than that, it will be the best since the economy roared ahead at a 7.2 percent rate in 1984, a year when another Republican president - Ronald Reagan - was running for re-election.
"We are moving into a sweet spot for the economy with interest rates not too high, jobs coming back and business investment providing strength," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One in Chicago, who is predicting GDP growth of 4.8 percent this year.
President Bush is highlighting the improving economy at every opportunity while Democratic challenger John Kerry has focused on what he calls a middle class squeeze of rising health and tuition costs and laid-off workers forced to take lower-paying jobs.
Who will win on the all-important pocketbook issues? Economists aren't sure.
"It is unclear whether voters will remember the past year and the better jobs created during that period or the past four years," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "It will be a close call and that is one of the reasons the election could be so close."
Assessing the economy at midyear, most private economists are sticking with the optimistic forecasts they had six months ago, even though inflation, driven by surging energy prices, rose higher than expected and the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates last month.
"We are looking for a darn good year despite the fact that we had a big jump in oil prices and interest rates are going up faster than people thought would occur," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
Offsetting those drags on the economy has been stronger growth in Japan and China, which helps U.S. exports, better-than-expected consumer spending and much better job growth than analysts were expecting as the year began.
The economy has now created 1.5 million new jobs since last August, compared with a loss of 2.7 million jobs in the previous 29 months, when the country was struggling with a string of blows from a collapsing stock market to a recession and terrorist attacks.
Even with the 10 months of consecutive job gains, Bush is still facing a 1.2 million jobs deficit, from the last peak for employment in March 2001.
However, many analysts anticipate the economy will generate around 200,000 jobs per month over the next six months, a pace that would be enough to erase his deficit figure by the end of the year. That would enable him to escape being the only president since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression to have lost jobs while in office.
Although the economy created only 112,000 jobs in June, after averaging 304,000 jobs for the previous three months, analysts expect strong job growth the rest of this year.
They predict the unemployment rate - stuck at 5.6 percent for most of this year - will improve gradually, to 5.3 percent by December, as a strengthening job market draws people back into the labor force.
Analysts also are optimistic about inflation in the months ahead, noting that oil prices recently retreated from peaks above $42 per barrel in June, and regular gasoline have declined from highs over $2 a gallon in late May. If the trend continues, inflation pressures will be eased.
The Bond Market Association's economic advisory committee, made up of economists from large financial institutions, is predicting that consumer prices will rise 3.1 percent for all of this year, a significant moderation from the 5.1 percent rate of increase through May.
The group projects overall GDP growth will be at a 20-year high of 4.7 percent, based in part on a belief that the Fed will keep to its pledge of moderation in future rate hikes because of the absence of inflation pressures.
"Tai and company probably figured they could make a quick buck as an AMD long..."
My sentiments exactly. But good god, is this still happening in the litigious climate of 2004 (martha stewart)?
I don't believe Dell rumors anymore, remember "spitfire"?
I think this run up is a classic amd pre announce runup and then back down over the course of the week after the announcement to half or less than half of INTC's price.
That's one thing you can't take from chipguy, intc is amd's tail, and when intc wags, amd gets knocked around.
Off course, the day will come when amd gets it's ears clipped, it's tail chopped, and the collar around it's neck will have spikes in it. I'm thinking Doberman here. I'm inclined to name this dog HAMMER for old time sake. Well then again, maybe JERRY would be more appropriate.
What a tenacious hard ass he is........
Chippy, the shorts can cover both sides of their buys.
It has nothing to do with your fantasy of AMD falling off the technology ledge and everything to do with a small company battling a, ah, watchamacallit, oh yah, 800 pound gorilla.
The BS has been talking and doing no walking on the intel side since Sledgehammer was a plastic mallet in a toys are us toolkit (recommended ages 2 to 5).
Don't forget potato chip. AMD's upside doesn't even have to be a glimmer in intel's eye. It just has to happen...you know, just like Opteron adoption is happening.
Regarding AMD's historical track record, well, I'm no "chipguy", but it seems to me that grantsdale (recently) and the rest... et al have had a few problems for the past few years.
Sgolds, can't you just delete the cookie?
Or am I spoiled rotten?
Asus goes out on a limb on AMD64 technology
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16863
Can Intel put the genie back into the bottle?
By Mario Rodrigues: Monday 28 June 2004, 07:39
ANOTHER BANNER ad, this time courtesy of mega-motherboard manufacturer Asus, provides another intriguing story. This follows Sun’s "in-your-face" banner ad campaign for its AMD Opteron based server, which clearly spelled out the server’s performance advantages over its Intel Xeon based competition.
Asus USA’s banner ad links to a marketing page that could prove controversial for the board maker. The page headlines: "Powering the Best Motherboards Available", which then follows with AMD, VIA, and Asus logos.
In the first section, the first sentence of the second paragraph really nails the flag to the mast:
"AMD's AMD64 technology delivers the best performance available for today's 32-bit applications while providing a growth to even higher performance 64-bit software."
Asus goes on further to say:
"Together AMD, VIA, and ASUS have created motherboards that have the distinction of being praised by top reviewers and selected by the world's top gaming system builders."
Intel won’t be pleased to read that sort of language from a tier one motherboard manufacturer, especially Asus, but benchmark results and review verdicts attest AMD64’s overall performance advantage.
Asus also says:
"A leading class processor needs a superior chipset as a foundation. VIA's K8T800/K8T800 Pro chipsets with Hyper8 technology is an ideal platform for AMD's Athlon™ 64 and Athlon™ 64 processors. The K8T800 enables an unparalleled range of cutting edge I/O and multimedia features, including an optimized high-speed 1.6GHz HyperTransport Bus Link."
Via will be pleased to have that kind of limelight, but there are still those chary of Via motherboards. Nevertheless, if Via is able to maintain the standards that it has set with its AMD64 chipsets, by the time AMD’s K8 replacement chip debuts, that attitude should be well and truly buried.
The rest of that page goes on to promote Asus’ top three AMD64 motherboards for socket 754, socket 939, and socket 940 platforms, which are all VIA powered. Asus describes its new socket 939 based A8V as "The New Performance Champion".
Asus steps on the Tiger's Tail
Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers are normally muted when it comes to promoting AMD processor based motherboards, as they're very dependent on the chip giant for chipset and processor support when developing Intel based products. They understand the ground rules. They won't be in Intel's good books if they step out of line, which could be bad for business. So Asus' forthrightness in its marketing literature is surprising.
Up to now, Intel has pretty much had tight control over the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, so Asus’ action will be seen as stepping beyond the mark. If Intel isn’t able to put the genie back into the bottle, the other Taiwanese board makers may gain confidence and follow Asus’ example, which would be an interesting development.
Nvidia can’t be happy with the status quo
With all the bells and whistles that Nvidia’s late arriving second generation nForce3 core logic brings to the table, the chipset vendor has to feel a little frozen out by Asus. Nvidia only has two nForce3 based motherboards in Asus’ seven model AMD64 line-up - the rest being VIA based. It’s worse though at Abit - no AMD64 offerings in its four model line-up. So Nvidia’s late arrival with a competitive chipset looks to be costing it dear again. To gain the mindshare advantage that it currently has in the socket A space with its nForce2 platform processors, Nvidia will have to add a performance edge to its feature set advantage, which would truly differentiate its offering.
Intel has a plate full of problems
As Nvidia works to garner more design wins for its nForce3 core logic, it can be thankful that it doesn’t have the challenges that are on Intel’s plate. With the chip giant’s socket 775 platform receiving a cool reception from some, Intel has an uphill battle to win hearts and minds. Issues associated with that platform include thermal and supply issues with Prescott, the high cost of DDR2 memory, motherboard manufacturer socket 775 concern about potential mainboard returns because of bent processor socket pins, partner concern over the BTX platform, and a recall issue with ICH6 south bridge based motherboards. Taken all together, this doesn’t make things rosy for Intel at all. With all those issues on Intel’s plate, the chip giant's dual core processor platform can’t come soon enough.
One has to wonder why Asus has spoken so frankly in its marketing material. Could it have anything to do with the issues that are on Intel’s plate? The Taiwanese motherboard/infrastructure companies have no doubt told Intel what they think. Maybe this is Asus just publicly venting its frustration; or could it really be putting its customers who buy its products first? µ
Sun goes back to the future with Metropolis
By Ashlee Vance in Shanghai
Published Wednesday 2nd June 2004 08:27 GMT
Sun Network Sun Microsystems is determined to put the W back in SUNW with the help of a new Opteron-based workstation.
Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz unveiled the company's first Opteron-based workstation today at the Sun Network conference in Shanghai. The box is meant to revive Sun's flagging workstation business by letting the company participate in the x86 market instead of just RISC-based gear. Along those lines, Schwartz reminded the Shanghai crowd that the W in Sun's SUNW ticker symbol stands for workstation - the type of kit Sun was first famous for.
"It seems like we ought to get back to workstations," Schwartz said, during a morning keynote.
Sun is not officially announcing the product just yet or putting it up for sale, but Schwartz did show off the box on stage during his speech. The sleek silver tower system - code-named Metropolis - runs on two Opteron 248 processors and was demoed with Sun's Java Desktop System software. Sun also plans to run Solaris x86 on the kit.
Sources at Sun Network told The Register the box should be generally available next month. Sun initially placed a limited number of orders for the kit but has already received higher than expected demand, according to the sources. One unnamed customer has pledged to buy more than 5,000 boxes - a figure higher than Sun's original order. When the system starts shipping in July, Sun will offer it with the Opteron 250 processor as well.
Strong sales would certainly help out Sun's workstation business. The company dominates the market for RISC-based systems, but that does not deliver the greatest of bragging right, as Xeon-based servers far out ship the RISC kit.
In other hardware news, Sun also released a new Netra server for telcos and new storage gear.
The NEBS-complaint Netra 440 will ship with four 1.28GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors and support up to 16GB of memory. The 5U box starts at $13,995.
To complement this box, Sun is shipping the new StorEdge 3120 SCSI system, which is also NEBS-compliant. Sun additionally now has the StorEdge 3511 with lower-cost Serial ATA drives. ®
Related stories
Intel 'acquires' Russian Itanium killer's R&D staff
Can Sun mature from Xeon boy to x86 man?
EBS outpaces Sun with Solaris x86 kit
Sun must replace hot air with firm chip detail - Gartner
Sun slams Red Hat
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Published Friday 25th June 2004 21:06 GMT
Sun has launched an all out offensive today against Red Hat Linux, putting Solaris x86 at the tip of its bayonet.
"We are a big supporter of the open source movement and have been forever," said Larry Singer, SVP of global market strategies at Sun, in an interview. "We think Linux is a huge movement that is pretty good for the industry and that for some implementations Linux makes sense. We also think there are a lot of people that consider Red Hat for the wrong reasons."
That was one of the more polite things Singer had to say about Red Hat - his comments coming as part of a thwart-Linux push by Sun. Singer spent much of Friday on the phone with journalists, saying that Red Hat costs more than people think, is not as well suited for enterprise tasks as Red Hat claims and is largely inferior to Sun's Solaris 10 operating system for x86 systems.
Shocking? Hardly.
On July 13, Sun will roll out a new Opteron-based workstation code-named Metropolis. A short while later, Sun will also roll out a 4-way Opteron server - the V40z. These two new boxes along with Sun's existing V20z 2-way server were all designed by Newisys. Sun plans to roll out in-house designed gear that is said, by many industry insiders, to be nothing less than fantastic later this year.
The sum total of all this is that Sun will, for the first time, have serious hardware for running Solaris x86 and, in particular, Solaris 10. And nothing could be more key to Sun's future than having a thriving Solaris franchise on x86 machines, since no other major vendor has a competing version of Unix on these systems. Sun is arguing that the industry as a whole got caught up in the Linux hype, which has started to die down, Singer said.
Sun insists that the revenue from Lintel boxes comes from the hardware itself. But Red Hat is forcing customers to buy pricey services contracts along with its OS, "which makes Red Hat more expensive than Solaris," according to Singer. And Sun's close Linux partner SuSE is not immune from criticism either.
"The reason we are not going after SuSE is because they are not as strong in the US," Singer said. "They are just not there. SuSE has not become as arrogant with the market because they do not have the dominance that Red Hat has had."
But, if SuSE were a major player in the US, Sun would be happy to launch a Friday attack against it as well.
So while Sun sells both Red Hat and SuSE on its servers, the company insists that Solairs is the better buy. Solaris, says Sun, is a more mature operating system with the better security and stability. In addition, with Solaris 10, customers will be able to run Linux applications natively on the OS. And beyond all that, Solaris 10 has some eye-watering features which we have talked about at length in the past. The obvious take up from all this being that Sun would prefer a Solaris sales over a Linux sale any day.
Same old, same old, right? Well, there is a change under way. In the old days, Sun concentrated most of its venom on Microsoft and spewed but a wee bit out on Linux. These days it looks like Linux is the prime target. ®
Related stories
Fujitsu unleashes 90nm SPARC64
SCO trumps Sun's open source Solaris bid
Sun gets liquored up on own code
Sun goes back to the future with Metropolis
Sorry mas, I hadn't read your post.
But what the heck, good news is worth reading twice!
Only the Paranoid Survive, now we're talkin......
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3373261
June 24, 2004
AMD Adds Mobile R&D Lab
By Michael Singer
AMD (Quote, Chart) is investing time and energy in developing chips for more than just the server or desktop.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based semiconductor maker said it is continuing development on three of its chip families -- Athlon 64, Alchemy and Geode -- for low-power form factors including thin-and-light laptops, consumer electronics and communication devices. The announcement on Wednesday coincided with the opening of a research and engineering laboratory at AMD Japan's Tokyo headquarters.
The company has assigned Steve Polzin, AMD Fellow and Chief Platform Architect, to initially manage the facility with as many as 20 engineers joining him over the next 12 to 18 months. Research will run the gamut of low-power issues such as electrical, thermal and silicon designs. The team is expected to work closely with AMD's silicon engineering teams in Austin, Texas and Dresden, Germany, as well as platform engineering teams in Austin and Taipei.
AMD said it chose Tokyo for the lab because it felt the Japanese market has been leading the rest of the world in mobile computing adoption. With notebook PCs outselling desktop units since 2001, Japan's thirst for mobile devices shows no sign of slowing down. In 2003, AMD noted that the notebook segment comprised nearly 55 percent of the Japanese PC market and continues to expand.
"Japan is the country where mobile computing trends are set," said Kazuo Sakai, corporate vice president, sales and marketing, AMD South Asia Pacific and Japan. "By establishing this new engineering lab in Tokyo, our Japanese customers will be able to influence and contribute to mobile device feature definitions in a more significant way."
Already, AMD has found an interested development partner in Sharp Electronics, which said it would work closely with AMD to develop future notebook PCs.
The new Athlon64 notebooks are expected to include AMD's multi-tasking HyperTransport technology as well as an antivirus feature that works in concert with the upcoming Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 to prevent common attacks like buffer overflows.
AMD said its Personal Connectivity Solutions Group (PCSG) will be looking at new ways of developing the company's Alchemy and Geode chips for multimedia devices as well as growth opportunities in consumer electronics and communication segments.
The Geode processor family is part of AMD's non-PC Internet Appliance market. Along with its Alchemy processor family, the company is targeting multimedia, access devices, computing devices, with growth opportunities in consumer electronics and communication segments. The new chips are expected to compete with other fanless, low-power processors such as rival chipmakers Transmeta (Quote, Chart) and their with its Crusoe and Efficeon chips as well as Intel's (Quote, Chart) XScale product line.
Help me please, I read a fool article, now I'm choking on my pasta....oh wait a minute, a nice long chug of 'Pinch' and some H2O seems to have helped.
http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2004/commentary04062412.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=...
What a convoluted piece of shit.....Is this guy living in the same decade as us?
Tech Stocks Not Worth the Risk
Some investors swoon over technology's potential, but they might be overlooking some very real problems in the sector. Even if tech investors have a good grasp of the technology, they must be on the lookout for the next big thing that could make their company obsolete overnight. Even if the technology seems sound, valuation and option issues can drastically reduce potential gains. No thanks.
By Richard Gibbons
June 24, 2004
We're Dueling over tech stocks this week on Fool.com. In this article, Fool contributor Richard Gibbons says investors should beware of the tech sector. But Tim Beyers thinks tech stocks should be a part of everyone's portfolio. Read them both and then vote for your favorite.
Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A)(NYSE: BRK.B), does not invest in the technology sector, a position for which he took a lot of flak at the height of the tech bubble. Buffett's simple answer has always been that he does not understand technology. But I think this really is just a way to summarize a raft of problems with investing in technology.
Technology is tricky
The straightforward interpretation of Buffett's answer, that technology is hard to understand, deserves mention, even if it seems overly obvious. One important rule of investing is that you should understand how the company makes money -- a rule I violated in my deep, dark, pre-Fool days. Alas, I learned then that buying companies whose business I didn't fully grasp was not exactly a path to wealth.
Thus, anyone who owns Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) should spend the time to learn how the Internet works, what the difference is between a router and a switch, and how these technologies are changing. Meanwhile, a potential McDonald's (NYSE: MCD) investor can spend a few hours thinking about the 10-K -- and maybe grab a Quarter Pounder -- and have a pretty good idea of how that company makes money.
So, maybe this just means that tech is a great place to be, because you're not a lazy investor and are willing to spend the time to understand the technology. That brings us to the next problem in the tech sector, neatly summed up by the title of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Chairman Andrew Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive.
The problem stems from the high rate of change in technology relative to almost any other sector. Tech bulls tend to focus on potential high growth that such change can bring, but investors should be aware of the negative consequences as well. For example, it is difficult to sustain a competitive advantage in technology because of the fast rate of both evolutionary change and disruptive change.
Evolve or die
Evolutionary change happens when technology improves incrementally, such as the speed of computer processors increasing each year. It requires companies to constantly expend resources simply so they don't fall behind.
You see this effect with most hardware manufacturers. For instance, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) are constantly burning cash trying to improve the performance of their processors just to remain competitive. Compare this with Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) and PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), whose core products can remain unchanged for decades, leaving piles of free cash flow to be distributed to shareholders or invested in opportunities that will actually increase revenue.
Disruptive change is even worse than evolutionary change. Disruptive technologies offer a completely different value proposition than existing technology, and may underperform the existing technology in the near term. However, a disruptive technology that initially only seems to address a niche can take over the market. For example, digital photography is a disruptive technology for traditional film photography, resulting in Eastman Kodak's (NYSE: EK) recent dismal performance. Similarly, TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO), a pick by David Gardner in Motley Fool Stock Advisor, is a disruptive technology for the VCR.
Disruptive change can happen in non-technology businesses, but technology companies are particularly vulnerable. And disruptive change can demolish companies that seem to have huge competitive advantages. WordPerfect once had a leading position in word processing, but faded when Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) was faster at creating a decent word processor for Windows. Similarly, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), once a dominant company with piles of cash, a strong brand, and good technology, is now a memory after its mini-computers were displaced by PCs. Even IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been hit. Its dominance in mainframes 25 years ago means little now. According to IDC, IBM's mainframe sales in 2003 were about $4.2 billion, less than 5% of its revenue, and negligible compared with the $178.1 billion PC market.
The implications of change
Thus, technology is extremely difficult to predict, even in the short term. As a speculator looking for a lottery ticket, that isn't a concern. But as an investor, it's a huge negative. Ideally, the company you invest in will grow and prosper over time. That's particularly challenging in an industry where only the paranoid survive, where a single mistake can lead to the death of the company. It's much more preferable to invest in simple industries with a strong, sustainable advantage, where management can make huge mistakes, trip over its own feet, walk into walls, and the company can come out the other end still profitable for shareholders.
Investors should consider this when they value stocks using the discounted value of their future free cash flow. This method uses earnings of future periods to derive the present value of an investment. According to this valuation method, a dollar a year from now is worth less than a dollar now, because if you had a dollar now, you could put it in a bond, and get back more than a dollar in a year's time. In addition, if you're talking about a company's earnings, there is some risk that something could go wrong and the company might not earn that dollar in a year. Thus, that future dollar of earnings has to be discounted to get its present value.
When we look at technology, the constant change means increased risk, which implies that the discount for the future earnings of technology stocks deserves to be greater than stocks with more predictable earnings. Consequently, all else being equal, the valuations for tech stocks should be lower. However, this hasn't been true for much of the last decade. Speculation and excitement over potential new technologies have resulted in tech stocks commanding a premium, a sign that investors should be wary.
Weighing the options
So, after all this, suppose you end up picking a tech company that is able to prosper over the long term. You'll then be able to see how, through the magic of stock options, the company's insiders devour a large portion of your profits. Stock options, an expense that technology executives have fought hard to avoid accounting for, are not exclusive to technology. But their use in the tech sector is notorious.
Options are generally issued yearly to employees, and give them the right to acquire shares at some fixed price some time over the next decade. They don't currently show up on the income statement, and you have to delve deep into company 10-Ks to find what the effect on income would be if they were expensed.
The numbers are ugly if you compare the reported income with the pro forma income the company would have had if it had expensed options at fair-market value. From recent 10-Ks:
The Magic of Options
Company Reported
Earnings Pro forma
Earnings Percentage
Overstated
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) 0.86 0.71 21%
IBM (NYSE: IBM) 4.40 3.81 15%
Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) 0.50 0.33 52%
Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) 1.03 0.71 45%
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) 0.44 0.37 19%
eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) 0.69 0.38 82%
Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) 0.39 0.06 650%
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) 0.46 0.00 --
Thus, even in the best cases, earnings are significantly overstated. In the worst, it seems like shareholders just receive management's leftovers.
Summary
Investors have a choice. They can go for the excitement of expensive tech companies with unpredictable earnings diluted constantly by management options. Or, they can buy cheap companies with strong long-term competitive advantages that will reliably print cash for investors for decades. I'm going with the cash.
Next: Read the bullish take on tech stocks.
Fool contributor Richard Gibbons is biding his time in Vancouver, contemplating irony. He does not own any of the securities mentioned in this report, but welcomes your thoughts at Richard.gibbons@telus.net.
Welcome back to the fray sir.
The future of Prescott: when Moore gives you lemons...
Posted June 20, 2004 @ 11:29PM, by Eric Bangeman
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/004/prescott-future/prescott-1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/18/25FE64bits_1.html
Affordable 64-bit computing
Want back-end power at a desktop price? AMD’s Opteron and Apple’s G5 deliver
By Tom Yager June 18, 2004
IT is rediscovering a simple but nearly forgotten principle: Throughput and capacity are everything. It hardly matters how fast the processor is if, like a Ferrari in city traffic, it bogs down every time it has to reach out to memory, peripherals, and other CPUs. A Xeon server running a static workload (that is, a predictable set of apps with stable resource requirements) is an unbeatable solution for the money. But today’s dynamic workloads -- from grid applications to real-time BI to virtualized resource partitioning -- force the 32-bit Xeon to spend as much time moving data as it does crunching data. It is optimized purely for the latter.
For dynamic workloads, IT has traditionally turned to 64-bit Unix servers with fast I/O and lots of expandability. Yet those servers’ enormous cost, trailing compute performance, and never-ending maintenance needs fueled the migration to Xeon in the first place. The ideal solution would be big-iron-like throughput and capacity without the sacrifice of Xeon-like compute performance and affordability -- something between cheap 32-bit PC servers and 64-bit IBM Power, Intel Itanium, or Sun Sparc machines. If low cost could be complemented by backward compatibility and smaller form factors, so much the better.
That sweet spot has been filled. Two emerging 64-bit platforms, one built on AMD’s Opteron and the other on IBM’s PowerPC 970FX, have stepped into the breach. Needless to say, we couldn’t wait to unpack two of the first systems based on these chips and see what
64-bit computing on a Xeon budget felt like. Our first test systems were a dual-Opteron reference server from AMD built on an MSI motherboard and a dual-processor Xserve G5 from Apple.
Disruptive hardware
The value of the Opteron and PowerPC 970FX platforms reaches deeper than processor alone. Operating systems, buses, and chipsets all play significant roles. But CPU architecture remains the primary differentiator in this new class of 64-bit systems.
AMD’s Opteron is the server chip in a lineup of 64-bit, Pentium-compatible processors that includes the desktop, mobile Athlon 64, and the groundbreaking Athlon 64 FX-53 for high-performance workstations. Of these, only Opteron supports multiprocessor configurations. Opteron’s magic is its integration of north bridge functionality -- memory and CPU communication -- into the chip itself.
The Xserve G5’s PowerPC 970FX is the latest product of the partnership among Apple, IBM, and Motorola. IBM contributed the core of its Power4 64-bit enterprise CPU to the PowerPC 970FX. Apple handled the rest of the Xserve G5’s system design, including the buses, north bridge logic, south bridge logic, and system (health monitoring) controller.
Both systems were tested as configured by the vendors, except that we bumped up both machines to 4GB of RAM. Standard features in both servers included dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, removable hard drive trays, basic VGA cards, and USB ports. Both machines came with server management software and could monitor multiple servers. The Opteron server was capable of lights-out management -- that is, remote control of power, configuration, and diagnostics while the server’s power is turned off.
You can’t break up this act
Both Opteron and PowerPC 970FX (we’ll use the simpler Apple G5 name for the duration of this article) can run any mix of 32-bit and 64-bit applications simultaneously. Of course, ideal Opteron or G5 performance is achieved when the CPU boots into 64-bit mode and all applications are compiled for 64-bit operation. But pure 64-bit operation is not yet practical for most of us. Tens of thousands of commercial 32-bit applications must be recompiled and validated.
Microsoft was unable to deliver a final release version of 64-bit Windows Server 2003 by press time. To test the Opteron, we used SuSE Enterprise Server 9.0 Linux loaded and configured by AMD. This Linux runs a 64-bit kernel and commands, and its development tools take full advantage of Opteron. That gave us the uncommon advantage of running in a pure, or nearly pure, environment. Opteron-enabled code has been mainstreamed into Linux and should be part of most major distributions.
The Xserve G5 ran OS X Server Version 10.3.4. This is a 32-bit operating system that puts the G5 CPU in a bridge mode that permits access to some of G5’s 64-bit facilities from 32-bit code. Apple’s Xcode development tools, which use an Apple-enhanced GNU compiler collection as a back end, will optimize for G5 to such an extreme that the resulting executable won’t run on older Macs. But Apple can’t do this for the kernel without forking it into 32-bit and 64-bit releases, which is a huge task.
Both test systems booted and functioned perfectly right out of the box. We set about compiling a handful of open source tests and found, as we’d hoped, that every project we compiled for SuSE Linux on Opteron also compiled, unmodified, for OS X Server.
Our performance testing focused on throughput. Memory throughput for both systems, as measured by the memory copy portion of the STREAM benchmark, was comparable at about 2GBps. That isn’t the speed of the channel between memory and the CPUs; it’s merely the speed at which STREAM was able to complete the relocation of a block of data from one place in memory to another. As we added more parallel test processes to both machines, we saw the unavoidable reduction in throughput. The G5’s memory throughput degraded in roughly a straight line, falling by half each time the number of parallel processes was doubled. On the other hand, Opteron had an amazing capability of scaling its memory throughput under increasing load. With eight parallel STREAM processes hitting both Opteron processors, memory throughput rarely fell below 1.2GBps. That speaks to the strength of Opteron’s on-CPU memory controllers and the SuSE Enterprise Linux pure 64-bit OS. However, G5’s memory copy throughput of around 1GBps is nothing to be ashamed of.
In contrast, the G5 has a strong edge in peripheral I/O performance. Apple’s custom I/O controller moved simultaneous data requests very smoothly among devices, regardless of the compute load or the busyness of other peripherals. This is in contrast to Opteron, which shows a pattern of I/O performance degradation under rising compute and/or I/O load that we expected from PC servers. Apple has the advantage of having far less backward-compatibility baggage than AMD, and it’s obvious to us that Apple’s design priority for its architecture was peripheral throughput.
The ability to run 32-bit apps without performance loss and support for both Linux and Unix eliminates the usual penalties suffered by migrating adopters. You can replace a dual Xeon server with a dual Opteron without installed applications -- including Windows enterprise applications -- skipping a beat. Likewise, the Xserve G5 will take over for any Apple G4-based server (including previous generations of Xserve and Power Mac G4) and will run nearly all open source Unix, Linux, and BSD applications.
Both architectures make exceptional Java application servers, with Sun crafting Opteron editions of Java for Linux and Solaris. Apple’s engineers do their own Java work and have built optimized desktop and server editions of Java, along with Apple’s uniquely simple and scalable Web Objects server software.
Commercial software vendors, however, are still deciding whether entry-level 64-bit technology is a wave to ride the crest of now or paddle behind later. Opteron has already gotten a critical mass of major software sign-ons to support its 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture. But with 100 percent Intel compatibility, vendors don’t need to rush migration, because users can continue to run their 32-bit software indefinitely.
Apple has a much tougher road ahead. It got a comparatively late start in the enterprise space. True, Apple may be able to pull developers in from other platforms (including Windows) with its free dev tools, BSD Unix base, and Cocoa client application framework. But if the company really expects software vendors to make the leap, it will need more than an attractive new 64-bit platform as bait. It must build on its nascent enterprise marketing initiative and do lots of Microsoft-style proselytizing.
For those who like to look under the hood, a few low-level facts are relevant when evaluating the platforms. Let’s begin by spelling out some of the advantages that both of these true 64-bit platforms have over Xeon.
First, despite all that follows regarding significant architectural changes, the compatibility promised by AMD and IBM (and Apple by extension) appears to be dead on. By default, both CPUs boot as 32-bit processors with operating systems and applications that are indistinguishable from 32-bit predecessors.
In Opteron’s case, compute performance in 32-bit legacy mode (see “Protecting Your 32-Bit Investment,” page 49) is comparable to AMD’s 32-bit Athlon MP. Even in legacy mode, Opteron still has on-board memory and multiprocessor buses. It still has a very fast Hypertransport link to the south bridge I/O controller, which in turn can move data from the CPU to expansion cards very quickly. And it still has the NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture that streamlines multiprocessing performance and increases the RAM limit to 4GB per CPU.
So from a high altitude, it appears that 32-bit legacy mode turns an Opteron into a Xeon. But that mode switch does not markedly affect Opteron’s throughput performance.
Likewise, the G5 masquerades as its predecessor, the G4, when it boots into native 32-bit mode. And as does Opteron, the advanced, throughput-tuned I/O architecture still operates with 32-bit OSes and apps. But the G5 is a massive reworking of the PowerPC core, so there are new instructions and a revamped internal execution design that extend more of a performance kick to 32-bit applications than Opteron can. Recompiled with optimizations for the unique features of the G5, 32-bit software gets a marked boost in both compute power and I/O throughput.
There is no easy way to access more than the 4GB of RAM that all 32-bit systems can read and write directly. Xeon carves memory above the 4GB line into segments that can be paged in and out of a reserved area within that 4GB space. Opteron’s capability of attaching 4GB of RAM to each CPU creates a potentially more elegant solution: If the OS can rearrange processes to run on the CPU that has the most free RAM, very little paging is needed. But Opteron can use the paging scheme, too, and memory attached to each processor is available to all the others.
Pulling past Xeon
Intel is right when it characterizes Opteron as having few unique advantages when it comes to increased physical memory. However, Intel would have to ditch its road map and redesign Xeon’s CPUs and bus to shift their emphasis from clock speed to throughput. In affordable servers, and to our knowledge servers with as many as eight CPUs that Opteron handles without intervening controllers, there exists no CPU and bus architecture that matches Opteron’s scale-in and overall throughput capabilities.
The G5 architecture, enhanced by Apple’s chipset and its OS X operating system, is quite another beast. The PowerPC 970FX processor’s I/O design is impressive, but in terms of basic design, it is within Intel’s capability of matching or exceeding its performance. What will keep G5 in the running is the superiority of Apple’s custom-designed chipset and IBM’s remarkable Power4 core.
Even when used as a 32-bit chip, the G5 RISC architecture is so efficient that thoroughly optimized applications can scream, especially on floating point math, at which IBM has always excelled, and on vector calculations. The G5, as implemented in the Xserve G5 platform, is more balanced with regard to computing and throughput power than Opteron, which is certain to remain the throughput champion in its price range for some time to come.
There is plenty to consider in choosing entry server architectures, but no matter how you load the scales, Opteron and G5 will be, for many reasons, better choices than Xeon.
<< Previous Page / 1 / 2 / 3
Tom Yager is technical director of the InfoWorld Test Center.
Copyright © 2004, Reprints, Permissions, Licensing
Nope or yep, hell I haven't written a date that I cared about in years so, I just didn't pay attention. But, it is good reading, no?
I think your right though Paul, I found another article dated 15/06/04.
I'm prety sure there are not 15 months in a year, unless the author's live near the north or south poles>
Back to the search!
Whoops, damn french wine!
Someone gave me a bottle Chateauneuf Du Pape for my birthday. It seems to be affecting my ability to interperet the written english language, especially regarding numerical dates. Damn french!
Then again it could be my Mac, or...old age :(
It's nice to have a Mac I can see into the future
Look at the date on this article.......
That does say Aug 6,2004 - right?
DATE: 08/06/2004 PRINT FRIENDLYNEC Launches Two-Way Itanium Blade Server
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
NEC Ltd is a long-time partner and rival of Hewlett-Packard Co, and the two companies have both placed substantial bets on the Intel Itanium architecture. Despite all of the noise about the AMD Opteron processor and the advent of 64-bit Xeons from Intel, NEC, like HP, remains committed to the Itanium processor, and not just at the high end of its server line. This week, NEC is rolling out its third generation of blade servers, and this one, called the IPF Blade, is based on Itanium.
The announcement makes NEC the first company to ship Itanium blade servers in volume. While IBM Corp and HP have dominated blade shipments to date, most of their blades - in terms of shipments - are based on Intel's Xeon processors. IBM will this week get its PowerPC 970-based blades out the door, and HP is flirting with Opteron and Itanium blades. But for the lowest cost per flops on technical workloads, a compelling case can be made for Itanium, and that is what NEC intends to do.
In the IT market, NEC is perhaps best known for its first generation AzuzA and second generation Asama Express5800 32-way Itanium 2 servers, which are among the most scalable servers in the world. These are general purpose machines that can run Windows and Linux - and even HP-UX if NEC wants to, since NEC has been one of HP's Unix development partners for a long time.
In the blade market, according to Scott Schweitzer, product manager for the Itanium server family with NEC Solutions America, NEC will be focusing on peddling Itanium blade servers into the clustered Linux environment, particularly for HPC customers who want high-speed InfiniBand interconnections as the backbone in their clusters.
While NEC is announcing the IPF Blade this week, the server will not start shipping until September since NEC timed its development and manufacturing for the IPF Blade to the delivery of the Madison Itanium 2 processor with 9 MB of cache. While this chip is expected to be available at 1.6GHz, 1.7GHz, and 1.8GHz clock speeds, according to the industry scuttlebutt, NEC is only planning on using the 1.6GHz version of the chip in its blade servers because the extra flops in performance is not worth the extra heat they generate.
A fully loaded IFP Blade chassis, which has nine blades with two 1.6GHz Madison 9MB chips per blade, will consume approximately 5,700 watts of electricity as it runs, delivering about 100 gigaflops of computing power. Three of these IPF Blade chassis can be packed into a standard 42U rack, with enough space left over for interconnection and storage, for 300 gigaflops per rack. Each blade has 12 DIMM memory slots - for a maximum of 24GB of main memory, soon to be doubled to 48GB - a sing le PCI-X slot, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.
For those who want a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect, NEC has partnered with TopSpin Communications for InfiniBand interconnection switches. NEC is using TopSpin's 10GB (4X) InfiniBand interconnect today, and will more to the 30GB (12X) InfiniBand. The addition of faster and wider interconnection will allow thousands of blades to be linked together into a single cluster. The blades in the IPF Blade chassis are hot-pluggable, and they include space for two 36GB or 73GB SCSI disk drives. However, with the boot-over-InfiniBand capabilities of the TopSpin switches, many HPC customers will probably boot over the SAN rather than store OS instances locally.
Schweitzer says that NEC is going to try to sell the chassis with nine blades - presumably with a single Itanium 2 processor - 2GB of main memory, a 36 GB disk on each blade, plus redundant power supplies, installation, systems management software, and maintenance includes for about $79,000 per chassis. If you do the math, that works out to around $8,700 per blade. NEC is going to sell these directly around the world as well as through its distribution channel.
On the software front, NEC will also be delivering its own Deployment Center operating system provisioning software with the box, and has similarly created its own blade management program. Ironically, NEC is only supporting Red Hat Advanced Workstation on the server, since the feature set and price tag on Enterprise Linux 3.0 is way to high given the number of nodes HPC customers normally use.
The HPC shops basically want a kernel, some libraries, compilers, and tech support. Hence NEC smartly is not supporting the full-blown Linux distributions from Red Hat. Schweitzer says that NEC will eventually support a variant of Novell's SuSE Linux, but would not say which one. A version of the new SuSE 9 Professional tweaked for the HPC customers seems likely.
As for Windows support on HPC clusters, that will not be happening this year, but if Microsoft Corp pushes into the HPC market in a big way, it could happen next year. NEC is looking at third parties - the most obvious are Platform Computing and the Scyld subsidiary of Penguin Computing - to supply Linux clustering support to link all of this together. Schweitzer says that NEC needs to keep its options open, since the HPC market uses a wide variety of clustering technologies.
While NEC is primarily targeting the IPF Blade at the Linux-based HPC clustering customers - meaning those who do simulations, financial modeling, genomics, weather modeling, weapons research, and similar applications - there is obviously a nascent market for clustered databases using Oracle Corp's 9i RAC, Oracle 10g, and IBM DB2 ICE.
NEC has been demonstrating IBM's future Stinger DB2 database on the Asama NEC 1000 enterprise servers, and it can quickly add parallel commercial database as a second market to chase as it develops further.
Cray Retains HPC Customer Via Opteron Strategy
http://www.cbronline.com/cbr_archive/550d05eb868c51e780256eac0032d13a
Supercomputer vendor Cray Inc has extended its relationship with the Stuttgart High Performance Computing Center thanks to its recent strategy to focus on high performance computing systems based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc's Opteron processors.
Stuttgart, Germany-based Hochstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart, or HLRS, has placed an order with Seattle, Washington-based Cray for a 256-processor high-performance system based on AMD's Opterons, replacing a Cray T3E massively parallel supercomputer.
The 128-node, 256-processor system has a peak performance of one teraflop and was recently installed at the HLRS facility at the University of Stuttgart to serve as a university-wide resource available to faculty, staff and students, as well as industrial partners through the HWW public-private joint venture with Porsche AG and T-Systems GmbH.
Cray has been rapidly expanding its Opteron-based HPC activities this year. It acquired Opteron and Linux HPC specialist OctigaBay for $115m in February, re-branding its 12K systems as the Cray XD1.
It is also planning to release a commercial version of the Red Storm Opteron-based massively parallel Linux supercomputer it is developing for Sandia National Laboratories. That project, known as Strider, will produce more scalable HPC systems due for release later this year.
I don't think AMD is a good long term investment at all.
But it is volatile and there are often opportunites for risk
takers that understand the psychology of this stock and
the cyclical nature of the industry to make a decent gain
in a relatively short time.
God, isn't that the truth! If I had sat home and played around like a trader for the past couple of years with AMD I'd be drinking much better wine tonight.
On the other hand, Ford moter company eventually lost share to it's competitors.
It seems to me that this little PT boat of a company is going to be financing it's own navy in due course. It's torpedos are not bouncing of Intel's hull any longer, it's just a matter of penetrating most of the water tight compartments.
Intel appears to be listing to port.
But the trading opportunities (for traders) will be bountiful for quite a while.
Fowler Talks Up Sun's x86 Prospects
http://www.cbronline.com/currentnews/b887ed9d8d05924980256eb60032d191
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sun Microsystems Inc has a new X86 server division, called the Network Systems Group, and a new executive vice president for that unit, John Fowler. Like the new president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, Fowler comes from the Sun Software business. Specifically, he was the chief technology officer for that unit. But don't get the wrong idea. Fowler knows servers, and more important, he knows all the right people at Sun who know them as well or better than he does.
Recently, Fowler called up just to talk shop. Like most Sun executives, he speaks bluntly and cannot answer a lot of questions about future x86 server product roadmaps. Sun's fiscal year closes at the end of June, so the company is none too eager to talk about future products as it is trying to close out its biggest quarter for sales.
For instance, Fowler could not say much about Sun's future Sun Fire V40z four-way Opteron server, which was expected a few weeks ago as part of the quarterly announcements. (The word on the street is that these machines are due to be launched in the third week of July, with general availability at the end of July, by the way.) But he did raise the curtain a little on what Sun will be doing with the Opteron and Xeon platforms, and how much leeway he has in order to do what he thinks is best for Sun to not become just an "also ran" in the x86 server business.
"Coming from nowhere, as we are in the x86 market," Fowler explained, "we can do almost anything." As you might imagine, Fowler is absolutely behind the subscription-based pricing that Schwartz is championing for all Sun products, including servers. He is particularly enthusiastic about this approach for a good reason. "If we have Solaris on the box, it gives me the option of picking up margin on the whole software stack."
Fowler did say that the Sun Fire V40z was coming and that it will indeed be a four-way Opteron box that supports PCI-Express peripheral connections and 4GB memory DIMMs. This machine sounds suspiciously like the Newisys 4300 server, a four-way Opteron box that fits in a 3U chassis that currently supports up to 32GB of main memory and will also support 64 GB of main memory when 4 GB DIMMs become available. The Newisys 4300 has six hot-swap drive bays and six PCI-X slots. Last summer, Newisys was acquired by OEM hardware maker Sanmina-SCI just as it was preparing to launch this four-way box. Newisys is widely believed to be the supplier of the iron that is essentially the Sun Fire V20z and V40z, although neither Sun nor Newisys has ever confirmed this. The delay in getting the Sun Fire V40z out the door might have to with moving the Newisys machine from PCI-X to PCI-Express peripherals (they are not the same thing; the latter has a lot more to do with bandwidth).
The other ace up Sun's sleeve is Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the original founders of Sun, who was the company's original chief technology officer, and who just came back to the company when Sun acquired super-secret Opteron server startup Kealia, just after it announced it would be backing the Opteron. Fowler and Bechtolsheim have apparently been given the go-ahead to shake things up in the x86 market.
"System design is not about cranking the clock speed any more," explained Fowler. "We can build different memory hierarchies and use different interconnections to make different kinds of servers. We really do have the freedom to do what we want. There are no restrictions on scale or pricing on what Network Systems can do. And let me tell you, we are going to do some things differently. We're going to have some fun, and I promise that we are not going to be boring."
Fowler said that while Sun was happy to be selling the Xeon-based Sun Fire V60z and V65x two-way servers, the company does not plan to roll out a four-way Xeon box. Bringing up the possibility of a Sun-branded Itanium server was laughable, given all the vitriol Sun has spewed about it in recent years. So there is no point in even bringing up the idea, unless something goes terribly wrong with the Opteron line. If anything, Sun will back the 64-bit Xeons if it has to have a fall-back position in the x86 server market. But Xeon is, from now on, going to play third fiddle to Opteron and Sparc, as far as Solaris is concerned.
Fowler has nothing against the Xeons, mind you. The server designs Sun is working on could incorporate Xeons. But Fowler says the price/performance advantage of the Opterons, for both Sun (which is presumably getting great prices on Opteron chips) and its customers, doesn't make Xeon as attractive as Opteron. "We'll be primarily an Opteron shop from here on out. This is just a practical choice," he said.
The reason why is that the Opteron design has lower memory latency and higher bandwidth, whether you are talking 32-bit or 64-bit x86 code. Fowler says that the real (and large) performance differences between the Opterons and the Xeons do not show up in the public benchmarks that have been released so far, because the tests have a lot of tuning in order to optimize cache sizes and branches. "With real-world applications we have tested, the uglier the code, the bigger the advantage is for Opteron over Xeon."
Fowler said that Sun has publicly committed to offering Opteron machines with one, two, and four processors, and he dodged the question about whether Sun will deliver an eight-way Opteron box. (No one has done it yet, which is a bit of a mystery, since the Opteron design is specially designed to use NUMA-like clustering to make eight-way machines from four two-way boards relatively easily.)
Fowler said Network Systems Group will be trying to create Opteron systems that promote an idea he is calling "diagonal scaling," which seeks to strike a balance between the vertical scaling of big SMP systems, like the Sparc-based Sun Fire machines, and the horizontal scaling of Unix and Linux clusters. In many cases, what workloads really need are big four-way or even eight-way nodes that are clustered together reasonably tightly, using very fast interconnection, but because they are clusters, they are not as costly to build as big SMP boxes. "The more operating systems and the more boxes you have, the more cost you have to bear," he said. "The trick will be to strike a balance." That could mean big Opteron boxes clustered together using Sun's own WildCat interconnection (developed for its Sparc servers) or using InfiniBand links (Sun has been a supporter of InfiniBand). Or it could mean, of course, that Sun has something else entirely up its sleeve.
AMD's 64-bits better than Intel's 64-bits - Microsoft
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16186
Cutler all over it, iAMD64
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 27 May 2004, 06:24
A WIDE-RANGING interview with Microsoft senior VP Bob Muglia has revealed that the software giant believes not only that there are differences between iAMD64 and Intel's EM64T but that the former is better than the latter.
The interview, on WinSuperSite covers a lot more of the Microsoft roadmap than just iAMD64, but what Muglia has to say about AMD64 versus EM64T is very revealing indeed, and confirms earlier stories about collaboration with the chip contender.
Muglia says - apparently to gales of laughter - that AMD has done a good job and that he thinks customers will be happy with either.
He adds that AMD has done things that Intel hasn't done but thinks Chipzilla will carry on investing and do "a really good job". However, AMD led the way.
Muglia says that Dave Cutler, now at Microsoft but formerly at Digital and working with Dirk Meyer on the Alpha chip, had been "all over this" and worked closely with AMD to design the chip, as we revealed at the Opteron launch last year.
By the end of next year, 64-bit chips will be everywhere. µ
Chris
I'll bring the wine (again????) This time it will be an opulent Pinot Noir, lots of meat in the middle, just like an Opteron!
Hello sgolds
It's good to see your comments on this board. I've learned so much from you (and others) in the past, and you have always kept a steady hand and a gentlemans perspective. Not that others haven't, but you are the cat's meow when it comes to patience.
Thanks for the welcome back.
Bill
Hello Comb!
Yep, this year is starting two weeks early, a wonderful indication of an exceptional vintage.
Alot has happened to me in the past couple of years. I bailed out of the wine business, and a few months ago dove back in head first form a 100 foot cliff.
The reason I jumped is because there was a big cushion at the bottom of the cliff.
I'll tell more later.
GO AMD!!!!!
Bill
*#@!?+#$!!, hiccup........burp!!!
Hello everyone
I'm back in the market and I'm loving AMD and SUNW.
Whether Sun is pushing sparc developement behind the scenes or not, AMD and Sun look to have a nice fast track evolutionary relationship going.
I've been lurking and enjoying the posts.
Semper Fi old friends.
winemkr
PS
even you bobs, you lunatic :)