Intel Corp (INTC)

[Saturn V]

Hi Rudedog,
A few months ago you claimed that with the loads you were benchmarking ( VM of 8+ copies of SQL) , there was a much larger access time penalty with Nehalem than with Shanghai. Does that still hold today ? The published VM benchmarks give the clear edge to Intel, so your old statements may not be valid with production Nehalem silicon.

According to you those shops which are AMD shops are going to continue with Shangai, because of greater compatibility with the VMs of vintage AMD servers. This is analogous to the mainframes which have survived because of compatibility issues with vintage software. In this situation does it make sense for AMD to drop the prices of Shanghai to compete with Nehalem, since a lot of its customers are not going to switch anyway ? By mantaining its prices it can milk its customers who cannot afford to do a wholesale migrationn to Intel. Lowering prices on Shangai may not win any revenue on the few greenfield projects, and lower its revenue on sales to legacy sites.