Dell Rejects AMD Chips (again) 353
LarsWestergren writes "A few months ago Slashdot reported that Dell was considering using AMD for server CPUs, but most people rightly remained sceptical since Dell has announced this several times before and always backed out. Well, according to the Register you were right to be sceptical." From the article: "Dell, however, doesn't seem concerned by these pricing issues or the fact that Opteron outperforms Xeon on numerous benchmarks. 'We believe that Intel has responded,' Rollins said in the wire report. 'That is now beginning to put customers more at ease that they don't need to make a shift (to AMD).'"
Re:Dell will never use AMD (Score:2, Informative)
If you used three numbers to identify a major product of yours, wouldn't you be a little peeved if someone else was using it too?
AMD lacks high volume manufacturing capacity (Score:1, Informative)
However, AMD has a serious problem: even if everyone suddenly decided to dump Intel and go with AMD, it couldn't be done. AMD just doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to churn out the volume necessary to completely displace Intel. That might be comforting to Intel, because they can pretty much do anything they want, i.e. churn out inferior, high priced product, for well into the future and not worry about losing significant market share. The only way for AMD to become the dominant processor manufacturer is to slowly and PROFITABLY chip away at Intel's share, and continue investing in new plants and partners (like IBM) to produce Athlons and Opterons. Unfortunately, AMD is still on rocky ground financially. Even as we speak, they are systematically closing down their chip fabs for one week stints as a cost saving measure. I want AMD to succeed, but it is going to be much harder than some fanboys think.
Re:Dell will never use AMD (Score:1, Informative)
You can trademark words, so long as they are not in common use in the field that you are trademarking them for. Evidence, Mustang and Pinto.
Re:Is AMD capable of supplying enough chips? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Customers are already making a shift. (Score:2, Informative)
Others with similar hardware were getting more than double the I/O performance, but were not using Dells. They had no answers for me other than 'trust us'. When I asked about AMD solutions which others had reported providing the necessary speed, they just more or less did the equivalent of staring at me over the phone.
I ended up buying an Opteron system from Iron Systems which has more then met the challenge. They are about to get yet another order for an identical system. That's $16k to Iron, and $16k less for Dell. Not to mention that they've lost my server business... probably close to $30k this year.
So it will add up. They can't keep ignoring Opteron.
Re:Please explain "better product". (Score:5, Informative)