Replies to post #4481 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Haddock]

I don't know where you are getting this 2000 number from but you could probably easily exceed that by counting the CPUs in the system sales announced on the newswires over the last month.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9467 perhaps. It's closer to 5000 than 2000, and it's circumstancial, bordering on apocryphal, I'll admit, but Intel lay themselves open to that sort of speculation when they don't announce their own figures. Those newswire sales would be part of the 2003 figure, I presume.

Arguing sales figures for Itanium is a rather pointless business though, because you keep hinting that sales are great, but you can't say how great or how you know, while Elmer hints that he knows the answer too but can't say, while the Inquirer spreads rumours that AMD has the answer and it's less than 5000 up to the end of 2002.

Every new architecture, even highly successful ones like S/360, VAX, and SPARC had very modest sales until a critical mass of applications was achieved to drive sales into production environments.

Of course the i423, the AMD29000, the NS16032, the Z8000 and the Transputer had very modest sales to start with too. And very modest sales in all.

On the other hand, I think the new SPARC64 architecture had pretty good sales from the get go. Perhaps because it ran legacy software at full speed. Also, the 386, another new architecture, got off to a good start as far as I recall.

[spokeshave]

chipguy: Re: I don't know where you are getting this 2000 number from...

It has been widely reported that only about 2000 Itanic systems were sold in all of 2002. Doug is technically incorrect with the statement of 2000 chips since most systems have more than one CPU. Any way you count it, however, there weren't many Itanic sales last year.

According to Dean McCarron at Mercury Research, Itanic 2 is not doing much better. Regarding the recall, he said "The Itanium 2 electrical glitch announced Monday isn't as serious as it could have been...[ because ] the actual number of systems affected is going to be tiny compared to the more traditional server market based on Xeon."

According to HP, they have "... not yet decided on how it will proceed with its Itanium 2 installed base, which is not a large volume, according to an HP spokesperson."

IBM immediately halted shipment of its XSeries servers, but "...said IBM had shipped only a handful of the systems so it would not affect a significant amount of customers."

If Intel is selling a lot of Itanics, they sure are keeping it a good secret.


http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-1001253.html
http://www.itnews.com.au/storycontent.cfm?ID=2&Art_ID=12011

[yourbankruptcy]

chipguy, it was posted on Bloomberg few months ago that the total amount of Itanium servers sold in 2002 was 3,000. And somewhere in different place I saw the estimate that there are from 3 to 4 cpu per server. So the total would be from 9,000 to 12,000 Itaniums sold in 2002.