Jock, I looked into the "Xeon not selling well" article that was mostly about HP." A piece of it:
Hewlett-Packard is dropping the Xeon--a more expensive derivative of the Pentium III--from its
workstation product lines because of tepid demand. Dell, meanwhile, will not be adopting the
newest members of the chip family for its workstations, although it will pick up later versions,
executives at the companies said.
The cold shoulder for Xeon largely comes as a result of overlap in the Intel product line. Xeons cost
more than standard Pentium IIIs but do not provide much advantage, executives and analysts said.
"People aren't necessarily following Intel's guidelines," said Shawn Willett, an analyst at The
Aberdeen Group. "The chips that are supposed to have lower performance are performing at or
close to the level of the higher [end] ones."
Xeons mostly get used in servers, and the volume of Xeon workstation chips remains small. Still,
indifference to the product line among workstation product managers will likely have at least some
impact on Intel's bottom line. Xeons for workstations cost between $50 and more than Pentium IIIs
and, generally, are more profitable than Pentium IIIs.
The key is this: Xeons mostly get used in servers, and the volume of Xeon workstation chips remains small.
Intel server usage is still going up, if you believe Intel, and right now almost all Intel based servers are on Xeon. What we have to hope for next is that LSI storage parts get designed into the IA-64 (Itanium and successors) servers. That's the cause for the grey non-Intel server based section getting squished down even more in 2001 and 2002. (See bar graph about half way down):
intel.com
The key difference between workstations and servers is that servers are primarily transaction processing machines, whereas workstations are used primarily for design needing great graphics. The transaction aspect requires very large L2 caches, which Xeon has, up to 2 MB per chip. This very large L2 is wasted in WSs. I still don't know whether LSI SCSI chip controllers are use in workstation motherboards, but I haven't heard that they were designed out of the servers (I looked at the Intel server chassis specs but they don't mention other companies' products in them like they used to).
developer.intel.com
Not too conclusive, I know, but we still know that storage is growing much faster than CPUs, and I have to believe LSI/Symbios continues to get their share.
Tony |
