Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pgerassi]

I have had lunch with a senior HP engineer who worked
on Merced and talked with him for an hour about what
went wrong on that program. And I went out to dinner with
the Intel engineer who, along with another Intel engineer,
designed the one cycle access L1 dcache in McKinley,
a big factor in this chip's large performance advantage
over Merced despite being made in the same process.

And still performance underwhelmed what the AMD64 CPUs did. VLIW processors should have been faster than they turned out to be according to the white tower intellectuals. Trouble was that the same compiler improvements helped the CISC and RISC designs to more than succeed against the static scheduled VLIW ones.

Yet more fantasy. In 2003 Intel had $100m in IPF MPU
revenue as reported by iSupply. IPF server revenue for
the year was $479m as reported by IDC. In Q4 2007 IPF
server sales were about $1.4B or about 3 times higher
than all of 2003. That implies Intel Q4 IPF MPU sales
were close to $300m. In contrast Mercury's numbers for
Q4 2007 show AMD's server MPU revenue as $170m.
As best as I can tell the break down was approximately:

AMD server: 570k MPUs @ $300 ASP = $170m
Intel IPF: 150k MPUs @ $1800 ASP = $270m

Same old tired assumptions of yours that have not proved out in the real world. IPF servers have more devoted to things like memory, I/O, disk and such infrastructure on a $ basis. Server revenue can't be back figured into CPU revenue so easily. "Implies" isn't proof of MPU revenue and you very well know it. Especially as the server size goes up. There the percentage of the total server price allocated to the CPUs goes down. And that doesn't cover the freebie CPUs given to many HPC installations by Intel.

Here is IDC's fine print:

IDC's Server Taxonomy maps the eleven price bands within the server market into three price ranges: volume servers (servers priced less than $25,000), midrange enterprise servers ($25,000 to $499,999), and high-end enterprise servers ($500,000 or more). The revenue data presented in this release is stated as factory revenue for a server system. IDC presents data in factory revenue to determine market-share position. Factory revenue represents those dollars recognized by multi-user system and server vendors for ISS and upgrade units sold through direct and indirect channels and includes the following embedded server components: Frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communications boards, operating system software, other bundled software and initial internal and external disk shipments.

That is straight from one of your posts in the Anandtech Forums:

http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/hp-looks-poised-to-overtake-ibm-in-server-market-t295-45.html

From the above, you cannot take IPF CPU revenue from IPF server revenue. You see as servers get bigger, more percent are in the other than processor areas. Opterons and to a lesser extent, Xeons, have this ability to have simple plug in and go upgrades. Those are mostly all CPU and labor revenue. And are a larger proportion of AMD64 server sales, especially Opterons. Many users simply plugged in quad core Barcelonas into dual core Windsor based servers. Boom, a upgraded server with twice (or more) the CPU power for only the cost of the CPUs themselves and the small amount of labor required. And a large part of Barcelona server sales.

And the last thing about server sales is that the amount allocated to the processor(s) also includes heavy markups of same. Its not atypical for HP to double the cost of the underlying CPU in the CPU price charged to the buyer. This is less done at the AMD64 CPUs because of the heavy competition in that market. So a $2000 HP IPF CPU charge means $700-800 for the IPF CPU itself, $50-100 for the HSF and card used and the rest for integration charges. So using the street price for Opterons and the marked up and added ancillery costs OEM IPF CPU price is comparing using two vastly different looks. And typical for your calculations. Mathematicians, scientists and engineers know the errors inherent in shifting bases (foundations, views) during calculations. It almost always leads to garbage results.

BTW, AMD64 CPUs covers the Xeons too as EMT64 was copied straight from the AMD64 manuals (with the same errors in the older manuals which is usually enough proof of plagurization). As I said, AMD64 CPU revenue stomps IPF CPU revenue into thin road veneer. I notice that you don't want to show the x86 server or CPU revenue (which is almost all AMD64 at this point).

Annual IPF server sales have increased by about $1B a year for the last five years and in a few months Intel will release the most competitive IPF processor ever WRT to its RISC and x86 contemporaries. And everyone will finally see what a *well designed* "native" quad core 65 nm processor can really do. :-P

One that comes out well after the competition did? What happened to your claims of 32nm IPF CPUs? Problem is that AMD will be nearly all 45nm or less by the time the 65nm IPF arrives. IPF has to hang on to the tail of the AMD64 CPU cash cow and couldn't make it on its own. And won't for the foreseeable future.

BTW, I notice the multi socket QPI CPUs (Nehalems) are pushed back into H1/09 amidst reports of QPI problems. That will likely include IPF CPUs using QPI. AMD reports that it will be 100% 45nm (or smaller) by the end of Q2.