Replies to post #17515 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Maui]

Keith,
Re : "If we were to ship Opteron Hardware it would put pressure on Intel to bring out its Yamhill chip," he said. "As soon as they play that card, it makes it more difficult for them to sell Itanium-based systems."

This doesn't sound like a strategy to follow, if SUN wasn't afraid of Itanium.

From this article :
Multithreading, 24MB Cache in Itanium 2's Future
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1382547,00.asp

In the second half of the year, the industry began seeing the adoption of Itanium crossing over from the high-performance computing space into the enterprise, fueled by a domino effect that began with Microsoft Corp.'s release of Windows Server 2003 in the spring.

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Any idea when the report for the numer of servers shipped in Q3 comes out ?

Maui.

[wbmw]

Keith, Re: "Solaris on Intel, Opteron and SPARC will give us an advantage," Schwarz said. If we were to ship Opteron Hardware it would put pressure on Intel to bring out its Yamhill chip," he said. "As soon as they play that card, it makes it more difficult for them to sell Itanium-based systems."

Wisdom from Sun's CCO (Chief Competitive Officer), or is he just echoing the same wishful thinking as BBS forums across the Internet? I wonder who first came up with that idea. Although another 64-bit architecture might have once conflicted with Intel's original marketing on the "IA-64" architecture, I doubt that many people see it that way, anymore. There is no reason why a 64-bit Xeon would in any way affect the IPF ramp. The 64-bits would also have to magically bring with it brand new scalability, machine check architecture and CPU RAS features, as well as twice as powerful floating point and OLTP performance. From what I've heard of Yamhill, it doesn't do any of these things. It's just x86 with the ability to address more memory. Whoopdie-do.

[yourbankruptcy]

Very bold statement from Sun indeed. So they have customer demand + politics in Opteron. Expect them to support it very, very well.

Dispite all problems, Sun is still #3 in the server market and it will take Dell another year to become #3 instead.

[Petz]

"As soon as they play that card, it makes it more difficult for them to sell Itanium-based systems." (Sun's Schwarz)

But wouldn't Yamhill, because of its x86 compatibility be worse competition for Sun than Itanium?

Unless Intel's Yamhill is something less than AMD64.

Petz