Replies to post #28136 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Doug, Re: From where do you imagine this grant of authority to judge others has originated?

Let's just say I prefer conversing on equal terms. If you are going to hold me accountable for predicting IPF's success, then I would like to hold you accountable for predicting its demise. Your "12 step program" comment was as close to a personal attack as they allow on this board. It does no good to your argument to tip-toe around this line. My desire is to discuss some of the finer points made here on this forum (from Keith and Sgolds, for example), rather than the one-liners you've made for the past several posts.

Re: If HP does cancel new Itanium sales mid-year, that will certainly accelerate Itanic's demise.

Indeed it would. So is this your prediction that I can hold you accountable for? It would make the discussion much better if you could define your point of view, rather than simply stating that everyone else is wrong.

[sgolds]

Doug, that just isn't realistic (at all) -

If HP does cancel new Itanium sales mid-year, that will certainly accelerate Itanic's demise.

HP has three major product lines just about converted to Itanium - Tandem, Compaq Alpha Unix servers and HP PA-RISC Unix servers. Do you have any idea how much work and time is required to change architecture on these machines? If you decide this year that Itanium is not the future for your company then by 2009 you can start having new product in the new architecture. These aren't PC servers, they require continuity and specialized software.

Even if you decide this year that Itanium is not the preferred architecture, you cannot start changing anyhow. You just dragged your customer base through a wrenching conversion to Itanium (from PA-RISC, Alpha and mips), losing many customers to Power (IBM). Making a move away from Itanium would effectively drive the rest of your customers into the waiting arms of IBM.

Another thing you are forgetting - why is HP using Opteron? Not to replace Itanium, I assure you, but to protect it. It is not in HP's interest for Itanium to become a commodity architecture. Rather, it is in their interest to keep Itanium high end & exclusive, charging lots of money for these systems. Moving the Xeon market to Itanium is the last thing that HP needs, so they need an answer for that market. That answer is Opteron.

I've been posting that position since last April. I consistantly said that it would be in HP's interest to adopt Opteron, just as soon as the production can support it, to protect their Itanium position. This view was disliked by both Intel and AMD fans - the Intel fans thought that HP would want to migrate Itanium everywhere, the AMD fans thought that using Opteron to protect Itanium margins was strange, to say the least.

Well, I called it and gave the reasons. Now the first quarter that AMD Opteron production can support bringing HP aboard, guess what? They are aboard.

No, this reinforces their Itanium strategy. HP is the one systems house where Itanium has a long, long future.