Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Klaus, Re: Frankly, I'm stunned it is you making this statement. :-0
Welcome to the club!

I'll take that as a complement.

I realize that AMD has made the best coup in probably their history as a CPU supplier. They attacked Intel at their weakest link with a solution that they can produce that outperforms in some very big ways, and Intel has nothing competitive in sight.

Without a quick performance fix, Intel is left with a few solutions. They can improve the features of their platform to include better server management, higher RAS, or beat AMD to next generation interfaces, such as PCI-Express and DDR2.

The other solution is to rework the software, which I believe they are already doing. Many of the benchmarks out there show Xeon MP very competitive vs Opteron, but that's because those applications have been tuned. In the case of ColdFusion in the Anandtech review, we see what happens when the application has not been tuned. It will be interesting to see if Intel can tune a critical portion of the server market applications - at least enough to hold on to their customer base.

I think Intel stands to lose some market share here, because some end users are more open to changing architectures, and performance is more of a requirement. From what I've seen, though, AMD will not gain Intel's business overnight. Sun still has customers buying 2-way and 4-way UltraSparc systems, which have languidly anachronistic performance characteristics. It takes a long time to get some customers to change their infrastructure.

In the end, though, the point is clear. AMD has a far superior solution to Xeon MP, and Intel's market share will erode until they can come up with a much better solution. Question is, when will this be? I don't think the 4MB Xeon MP will be more than a stop-gap, plugging up a bit of the gap in performance. Last rumor I saw, Potomac, the Prescott based Xeon MP, may not come until end of 2004 or early 2005. I think that gives AMD a huge opportunity in 2004, if they can execute. They are still missing some key ingredients to their server infrastructure, but they'll get there eventually.

It may be a very good time to invest.