Meanwhile Intel can only pray that AMD's SMP and mobile versions don't start shipping - Intel is defensless against them.
How is that? DP Foster is due, possibly as fast as 2.0 GHz, in the second quarter. I'll bet that's faster and sooner than any Palomino. And, for the ten thousandth time, the OEMs have no experience with AMD for servers, whereas they already have several months into developing Foster based servers, and the have at least five years experience working with Intel on servers in general (PPro, PIII, Xeon). Foster based server development underway includes mobos, chipsets (Serverworks) PCI, PCIX slots, hot plug including today's hard drives, PCIs, power supplies, fans and more to be announced hot plug features. Going on with remote, intelligent, even lights out management, and support for NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Novell NetWare, Unix, Linux, Solaris, even OS/2. Do you know how long it takes to design, verify and get into production all of this? A year, year and a half, that's how long. A lot of it is done on specs before any of the new CPU chips are available. There is no major OEM developing around an AMD SMP right now, since none exist yet. If specs were, and if someone started today, there might be an AMD 2-way server for sale about a year from now, at the earliest. I would personally give odds on none seeing the light of day until 2002.
As for AMD mobile, are they going to leapfrog PIII, soon to be at 1.0 GHz in mobile?
I don't buy it. AMD is stuck on the desktop for a long time, and that's the slowest growing segment of all right now.
Tony |
