rudedog Re: Also, I question your statement: Intel clearly won't be competitive in the top end for at least the next 6 months
AMD will be lucky to have a 6 week advantage, let alone 6 months. Intel's partners are already working with 1 GHz PIII parts, and the PIII design will have at least a 10% advantage over the equivalent Athlon due to the cache design. So AMD has to have a 10% raw speed advantage to be competitive... You can buy an 866 MHz PIII today from DELL which for all but a few tasks, has performance equal to the 1 GHz Athlon (which are pretty hard to actually get BTW). Have you looked at the lead times on those systems from Best Buy and so on? Try and buy one...
rudedog,
For the sake of DELL investors, I hope more are in touch with the processor situation now than you, or else DELL is in for a rude awakening. Thanks for the info about DELL's business, it was very interesting.
To address your point. This is only the beginning of AMD being in the lead of the speed game. INTC has nothing competitive to offer until Q1 2001 when Willamette comes out, that leaves 9 months. DELL is getting 200 1 Ghz parts a month (this number may have gone up). AMD is giving GTW and CPQ Ghz parts in volume. If AMD stays its course, in the next few weeks IBM, HWP, etc will also start recieving 1 Ghz parts in volume.
Benchmarks. DELL always performs the best in benchmarks. The Pentium and Athlon are roughly equal in benchmarks now. Wait until copper Athlons start shipping any day. They will get a huge performance boost. Not to mention the possiblity that they may be 1.1 Ghz or higher. Intel has no plans for copper until 2001, thus constricting the PIII to about 1 Ghz. The Athlon should scale well over 2 Ghz.
RAMBUST. Anyone getting a highend system needs at least 256 MB of Ram. If it's a RAMBUST system, chalk up an additional $1000 for total system cost. AMD chose the better memory.
DELL/INTC relationship. DELL blew Q4 because of INTC. A few weeks ago INTC announced their own line of servers (which will compete with all OEM's). I think the relationship with INTC and all of the OEM's may be getting strained. To me, DELL and AMD is a logical combination. For one, it eliminates the possibility of getting burned when your sole supplier of a part cannot deliver.
Anyways, this is JMHO. I hope to see DELL on board soon.
chic |
