Posted on 07/09/2002 2:53:33 PM PDT by JameRetief
Big backing for Opteron, if true
By : Tuesday 09 July 2002, 09:27
The Wall St Journal has been known to fact check a story so much that the hacks feel they're being given the third degree.
Yesterday, a long and worthy piece about whether big corporations will follow up their IA-32 server farms with IA-64 "big tin" terminated with an intriguing snippet of news. That is, if it isn't a rumour.
It said that Sandia National Labs, Cray and AMD were working together to make a "large system" using future Opteron chips.
It also said no one from any of these organisations were prepared to comment on such a deal.
But take it from us, this will have been factchecked several times before it hit the online universe.
So it's probably true, and if so, would represent a huge win for AMD and backing for its 64-bit plans over Intel's. µ
As far as commercial sales EVERY vendor, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Dell has jumped on the Intel bandwagon. Why? They deliver.
Bandwidth through the FSB and Core are far superior in AMD chips. Process handling is much more streamlined as well. Why do you think slower clocked chips out perform Intels big guns? Yes, Intel has somewhere around four times the manufacturing capacity AMD currently does, but they've also been around a lot longer. Intel also followed MS's lead in trying to get vendors sign exclusivity agreements (like Dell, Gateway, and HP). Compaq does actually have a couple of systems with AMD chips in them.
I guess the fact that AMD has been gaining market share proves that they have dug their own grave, huh? And that AMD's competitiveness has caused Intel to act erraticly in many of their decisions also proves AMD is digging their own grave?
AMD may have some advantages over some of the early Pentium line...and the newer Pentium 4's have better end usage performance.
What, do you work for Intel? Because that is pure BS. Anyone in the industry knows that the Athlon line of processors from AMD has been beating the Pentium 4 (Intel's newest processor design, not the "early pentium line") consistently and handily. The Athlon processors don't require the same high speed ratings to compete with the Pentium 4. In order for a Pentium 4 to beat an Athlon in performance, the Pentium 4 needs to be approximately 400 to 500 Mhz faster. It is only because the newest (and very hard to find) Pentium 4 is clocked so high that it is able to (barely) claim the performance advantage.
the Intel Itanium(servers/networks) is true 64-bit high end processing
64 bit processing is a full implementation in the AMD Hammer line as well. From an article discussing the differences between the Intel 64 bit and the AMD 64 bit solutions in multoprocessing configurations:
"The full 64-bit support [in the AMD Opteron] will be particularly popular in some of the larger workstation (or HPC) tasks, and there seems to be a lot of customer anticipation in this area, particularly from workstation users. This will require OS and compiler support, which appears to be good so far, though application support will take longer. The crucial difference between Hammer and Itanium is that current x86 customers can use all their existing applications at full performance.
And the market is already not looking favorably on the Itanium lines:
Itanic 2 sets sail without suppliers
Dell snubs Itanium 2 launch party
From the above article: "Roland Baker, president of NetExpress, which sells servers and workstations to universities and chip designers, sees a similar situation: Customers want Linux boxes with Xeon or AMD Athlon chips and show little interest in Itaniums of any stripe."
300mm wafer production is the next big evolution in semiconductor manufacturing and AMD is way behind in that.
Intel's Pentium 4 and Itanium processors, using the new 300mm wafer production, are still much larger and more costly than the flagship Athlon processors using the old technology. The wafer production is a cost cutting measure, but due to processor designs, AMD is still using less die space and thus it still costs less to manufatcure the AMD chips.
As far as commercial sales EVERY vendor, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Dell has jumped on the Intel bandwagon. Why? They deliver.
First, Compaq and HP are now the same company. Second, Each of these vendors sell AMD systems as well, with the exception of Dell. Why? They deliver. And even Dell is considering using the Hammer CPUs instead of the Itanium 2 based CPUs.
Has there been any public speculation you could reference (without putting yourself in jeoparty ) on the pricing for the clawhammer?
I think that is the low end processor to be introduced first!
Opteron and Itanium: Two Roads to 64-bit Computing
The Link is to Ace's Hardware.
The following leadin is from 2cpu.com:
Opteron and Itanium: Two Roads to 64-bit Computing
Posted by Jim at 7:56PM EST
Ace's Hardware has another interesting article up, this time dealing with AMD's Opteron and Intel's Itanium. Two companies with a different philosophy with respect to 64-bit computing. However, in the workstation market, the Opteron can be a very effective weapon. As we have reported before, the Opteron's platform is very scalable and the hypertransport is a very elegant way of interconnecting the ASICs making motherboard very flexible and less expensive. Running a 64-bit version of Windows, the Opteron can offer 4 GB to each 32-bit process without any performance hit. Being significantly improved over the Athlon MP, we expect the Opteron to perform exceptionally well in workstation applications...
This was an interesting read. See for yourself.
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