Replies to post #18860 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

Now, seriously, AMD has two main OEMs on board for
Opteron right now: IBM and Sun. One company very dominant and
currently in an upswing, selling more and more Xeon servers
which are paving the way for Opteron sales.

This makes no logical sense at all. More Xeon sales paves
the way to more Xeon sales in x445 boxes and eventually to
more IPF sales in x455 boxes which use the same basic
platform architecture. IBM doesn't even offer an Opteron
based commercial server.

I think that we will see HP on board selling Opteron
into the Xeon market next year as AMD's production ramp
accelerates, but that is just my opinion.

Again this makes no logical sense at all. HP is Intel's
co-architect for IA64 and is pushing it hard across the
entire computing spectrum from entry level workstation
to 64 way commercial server, has a dedicated compiler
group for IPF as well as multiple proprietary OS ports
ongoing. I'd sooner expect Intel to resurrect Alpha or
Sun to adopt IPF as a third 64 bit platform than HP to
start selling a product line based on Opteron.

[KeithDust2000]

sgolds, The other company is in something that looks a lot like a death spiral, gambling all for a turnaround.

This sounds just like all the other comments from you about SUN. I think you´re way too negative about them. They are still the third biggest server OEM in the world, with a solid balance sheet, a loyal customer and developer base, and a host of very promising initiatives in the making, in various areas. I think you´ll be quite surprised what this "company in a death spiral" will pull off in the next few years. I suggest you closely watch the news from the Sunnetwork Conference in Berlin to see what´s in store from them. And no, I´m not talking about SPARC, at all.

[Dan3]

Re: I sure do not share your vision! [re SUN]

I understand your concerns, but I think you're underestimating the importance of SUN's engineering teams.

Keep in mind that, even after buying several companies that were successfully making multiprocessor chipsets, Intel can't seem to produce one itself (leaving Dell without a competitive high end system).

I do not know why it is so hard to build a successful large scale system, but the fact is that there are only 4 teams in the world that can do so: IBM's, HP's, SUN's, and Fujitsu-Siemens'.

Given that IBM has Power and HP has Itanium (so that neither is likely to give enterprise support to AMD), to have AMD supported by SUN is a very big deal. Fujitsu-Siemens has been using Sparc and Itanium - it will be interesting to see how long that situation holds.

SUN has terrific engineering skills, both in hardware and in software, and the software part is at least as important as the hardware. SUN is just as capable of putting together a cheater compiler as is Intel - and that is a huge, major, vital deal. Intel's stuff has been made to look better than it actually is, relative to AMD, because Intel owns a compiler that can be twisted to present distorted test results.

With SUN's support, AMD will be able to present equally "optimized" results.

Without SUN, AMD has to ship products 20% faster than Intel's, in order to tie Intel in performance tests (due to Intel's use of a distorting compiler). Starting some time next year, AMD need only ship a chip as fast as Intel's, in order to tie it in performance benchmarks. And as long as AMD can continue to ship faster CPUs, it will finally start to get credit for the superb performance of its products, thanks to the partnership with SUN.

Now look at what this does for SUN. SUN's software and system engineering teams have done pretty well during the past decade, despite having been handicapped by CPUs with about the half the performance of their competition. Now consider the products and systems they'll be able to ship when their relative (compared to the the competition) CPU performance increases by 100%, almost overnight.

Sure SUN has been gradually losing share in recent years, but consider how well they've done while handicapped with HALF the performance of their competition. SUN builds superb platforms - now they're going to have superb price performance to go with them. I think they stand a good chance of doing very, very, well.