Re: Foster and Tualatin servers ...have been in development ....six to nine months ...Are any servers in progress of development ...based on AMD server chips, and for how long?
According to reports, Tualatin has just started to sample, and I've not seen any reports of Foster samples. I've never heard of any DDR SMP implementations of either sampling. Samples of SMP Athlons (using the DDR 760 chipset) were first shown months ago. So there is actually a chance that OEMs are presently validating DDR SMP Athlon systems, while we're still not there for DDR Tualatin and Foster systems. OEMs are at least evaluating DDR SMP Athlon samples, whether or not they are currently in development as near term SKUs, I don't know.
Intel spent a ton of money, and created a licensing nightmare for the industry, with its Rambus strategy. Intel's (and just about everyone else's) expectations were that at this point Intel would be shipping a families of Rambus based desktops and servers while AMD and its partners scrambled to develop their first RDRAM chipsets. This could have killed AMD.
Instead, it's Intel that's scrambling to develop DDR chipsets, and Intel has had to give up the strategic advantage it once held as main chipset manufacturer, and all the standards setting benefits that went with that. The same thing happened to IBM after the Microchannel debacle.
AMD has gone from not having an infrastructure (its CPUs once had to match whatever twists and turns Intel's chipset team decided to spring) to having its own infrastructure that's been pressing Intel to do some twisting and turning of its own.
I'm not even saying that AMD is yet tied with Intel, but that they've come very close, and AMD infrastructure has come from being behind more than a year, in less than a year - it's been a huge achievement for them, and puts them in a much better competitive position than most people were expecting the quarter after the dreaded Willamette (and AMD was once dreading it) began shipping.
Regards,
Dan |
