Interesting post, rudedog, I just noticed it because it made the SI home page. But I must, somewhat rudely of course, dispute something.
My understanding of the reason you can't get NT or Win2k on Athlon machines doesn't have much to do with the consumer/business line. Rather, it's just the line Intel has drawn. One of those backroom NDA contract negotiation things, where you have the "choice" of what Intel offers you or a horse head in the bed. The OEMs still have to deal with Intel, whether they like it or not. Somewhat related to Intel giving server "customers" what they want, at the OEM level, in the ability to use SDRAM, while the desktop "customers" really, really want to use Rambus, despite the 5x cost premium for little visible performance advantage.
Athlon does just fine running NT/Win2K, and I'd guess a bulk purchaser could negotiate a bundled deal with the OEMs. Athlon would be particularly good in the engineering workstation market, because of its excellent floating point, and I don't thing people much hold with Win9x in that market.
As for what, exactly, constitutes consumer versus business, you can contrast these 2 gateway systems. gatewayatwork.com and gatewayatwork.com. I imaging the 1000mhz Athlon system would be described the same way the 850 one is, I haven't checked back. The $979 Celeron system has NT as an option, and the $2k plus Athlon system doesn't. Why is that, rudedog? The Athlon system is described as a business system, too.
Cheers, Dan. |
