Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: Let me get this straight. So what your going to sell the server buyer is that while Paxville may still be 20% under performing Opterons it's 60% better than what it replaces from INTC. Boy talk about a hard sell.

You've got it all wrong, Bob. From a performance aspect, Paxville is hard to sell, but the value proposition does not stop there. Lindenhurst is still a compelling platform with a good array of high availability RAS features and managability hooks. The various OEMs such as IBM, HP, and Dell also have their own value adds.

From an end-user point of view, they are buying a complete package either way, so the CPU is just one piece from that package. Fortunately for Intel, they have put a lot of R&D over the years into server features that end-users demand. Lacking performance on the order of 20% is going to hurt, but my point is that this is not nearly as bad as lacking in performance by 60%. At least with Paxville, Intel has a chance of selling on the rest of the platform value proposition.