Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[SemiconEng]

From Your Favorite "Reporters" (Cough)

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9763
More on Opteron... Lateron
There might be a non-conspiratorial, purely economic reason for the dearth of Opteron MBs.
The Opteron version of AMD64 is targetted at servers. The chipsets available now don't have AGP. Consequently the only thing that can be built is a server board with little utility for other purposes.

The Taiwan MB guys aren't crazy. They generally build multipurpose boards to maximize their sales potential in return for the effort needed to design them and perhaps more importantly build inventory.

AMD sales into the server market have historically been a small percentage of Intel's. Further the server market is much smaller than the desktop market. So it might just be that they chose to wait for an AGP chipset to implement a multipurpose board rather than pursue a smallish percentage of a smallish percentage market.

This combined with a new CPU which has yet to be proven which inspite of the 64bit marketing still adds further risk. Recall how many bugs have been found after a million CPUs have shipped? Server customers are notoriously conservative and would be unlikely to put a AMD64 in a critical path until they have been fully wrung out, preferrably by someone else. That would add another "smallish percentage" multiplier.

Just to pick some numbers out of the air (which no doubt means they're wrong):

x86 Server units = 0.01 x86 Desktop units
AMD server unit share = 0.1
AMD64 "risk factor" = 0.2 (completely arbitrary)

That means the total multiplier might be as low as 0.0002. This in turn needs to be divided by the number of potential suppliers.

Now consider that the server TAM is more than half fulfilled by major OEMs and that whitebox servers would be the destination for these boards and the potential is further reduced. Assuming a generous 150M desktop current annual rate that yields about a 15000 unit whitebox potential for everyone to divide up.

Added to the current state of the world economy then it's no wonder to me why the MB suppliers have chosen to proceed cautiously.

jtm
Email address supplied



---Naaaaaaawwwww, It can't be that....... Could it??? Because then, that would mean that there is no "Evil Empire" conspiracy at all, and although it Walks Like A Duck........ It isn't. Maybe, Just Maybe, it's really a Platypus after all.

Semi