Replies to post #12303 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

wbmw, AMD64 does seem to have an advantage in significant high end compute server markets (much to my surprise). The design wins for supercomputers shows that.

However, the meat of the market for AMD is the Linux Sun-replacement box and the Windows servers, I agree. Introductory to mid-level servers. While we can agree that the opportunity for optimizing desktops for Athlon64 will be limited at first to graphics workstations and high-end gaming, the Windows and Linux server markets have far fewer applications which need this optimizing than desktops. Just a few web servers, database servers and network support applications and you meet more than 90% of the need. Much of that stuff will already come packaged with 64-bit Windows or Linux. So a handful of companies (who dominate these markets) is all you need - Microsoft, Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, Oracle, Semantec - the list starts getting sparse after that.

Thus it really won't take much to get general business needs optimized for Opteron, and AMD will have a good head start to get entrenched in this market before Montecito hits the street.

So will AMD64 start looking like 3DNow!, or will Itanium start looking Alpha, a nice idea that never made it? What obsoleted 3DNow! was that Intel came up with their own direct competitor. Without an x86-64 from Intel, Opteron goes unchallenged.

However, Itanium still has the HPQ architectures. It has a guaranteed market, but I am unconvinced that Itanium will ever make inroads as an x86 replacement.

[8-/]

wbmw, I don't think AMD64 has an advantage in the high end server market. As systems get larger, the price of the processors becomes a smaller percentage of the overall cost. The rest of the cost is built into functionality that can decrease the time between failures and decrease the time to fix failures. Itanium architecture and the supporting chipsets have much higher levels of RAS than Opteron, and performance is better in most cases. The Itanium ramp will start here. .
.
.In the end, people always want bang for the buck. They don't care whether it's x86 or not.

Could be why google runs on ~ 15,000 PCs. One fails they don't bother to replace it. Not 'cost effective'. It's the trend. Buy the cheapest *STUFF* that'll run the software, put in redundancy and walk away. When 1/2 the farm gets obsolete scrape it out with a front loader and start over.

It's why, IMO, Itanium's chasing an obsolete methodology. People cared about all that *JUNK*(RAS/MTBF/etc.) 10 years ago when the architecture of Itanium was being designed. (10 years ago I paid almost $1,000 for a 1G SCSI drive for my home PC. I *CARED* back then if a drive failed.) Building redundancy and not caring is the way of the future.

JIMO.

8-/

[UpNDown]

wbmw, on x86/AMD64 as dominant computer architecture

Thanks for your reply. I think you're mainly talking about chipset issues though.

What really intrigues me is that I made what might be considered a totally outrageous claim and nobody except you seems to be prepared to dispute it.

Perhaps a poll is in order! Let's try this, who agrees or disagrees with this (further outrageous) statement?

The race for the dominant computer architecture is over. With AMD64, the x86 line has won. It's done, done, done and AMD64 is the ultimate winner!

Once again, the rationale being that AMD64 offers everything that 99% of the market needs and is backed by manufacturing and development amortized over such huge volumes that no other architecture can ever catch up.