Dan, >You keep grasping at the straw of SMP when the bulk of the servers are co-located 1U and 2U boxes.
You may be the one grasping straws. Sure, the 1U and 2U (1U mostly) are the biggest sellers, but there is still a very nice distribution of server sales up to and including the 8-way (and 16 and 32 way coming also). Those are where the bigger margins are for both the server vendor and Intel. Also, if you look at the number of CPU chips sold per server type, the 4-ways and 8-ways get a significant share because it's times 4 or 8 times on the server bill of materials (BOM) for them. I know, DUH! Also, the 8-ways and the 4-ways use Xeons with 1M, 2M cache, the price of which are quite high ($1900 for the 2M), and therefore get big margins for Intel. That price still gets Compaq, Dell, IBM, etc. very nice margins because they can mark up the bigger servers much more.
So, when did you say AMD is coming out with the big cache server chips? Or, are they staying with those toy Athlons exclusively?
Tony |
