IBM warms to AMD Opteron servers

TalkBack 4 of 5:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

What a remarkable turn of events.....

Intel is paying for its mistakes and miscalculations: they let their x86 line to stagnate trying to save money but then AMD comes along and does a musch better x86 datapath than Intel itself (netburp ....;-) )and then they even make a very decent 64-bit processor out of the crippled x86 ISA.

Intel, while was just brainlessly bumping up the clock to the Pentium-4, it was at the same time bungling their EPIC IA64 line (with a long and hard upgrade path from their x86 to IA64). Finally, after the technical success of AMD was incontroversial, Intel pooed on their pants and they made a 90% turn, started working on Xeons + new MCH chipsets (the system bottleneck) so tht they can compete with Opteroms and it let Itaium to rot.

In the meantime, even HP de-emphasized the Itanium-2 and adopted Opterons! This is a huge deal since HP was the partner who helped Intel to design and improve the Itanium-2 to a point that it makes a decent 64-bit processor out of it. Smaller companies, such as SUN, CRAY and cluster vendors realised that the Opteron offered the "sweet spot" in performance vs cost and they opened up new product lines using it.

Now IBM is "smelling the roses" and is warming up to it ... ! Who would had though that after all the bruhaha people would just go back to AMD.

I only hope that AMD will obtain the interest in providing a TRUE RISC or EPIC chip for themselves. I like Opteron and HT but it is ISA-86-64 afterall......

Posted by: michael_t   Posted on: 04/28/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Breaking DB2 Platform Barriers Quest Software Are you supporting DB2 on multiple platforms? In this Quest white paper ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now