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Technology Stocks : INTC: Intel Corporation

INTC 41.50

+5.0%

Oct 28 3:59 PM EDT

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To: Dan3 who wrote (2)	3/12/2001 9:46:39 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (5) of 47

The particular application listed in the rumor for AMD's first SMP server win comes as quite a surprise. Having the first use of a new processor configuration be something as exotic and critical as a front end server may seem a bit strange at first. But it is consistent with my speculation that Athlon is particularly well suited for server applications with a great many threads and/or many small processes. A front end processor maintains the sessions of a multitude of users connected to a server cluster, not doing a lot of work for any particular process (it "forwards" each request to a server in the cluster). It does need to quickly cycle many relatively independent threads. This is exactly the kind of application where the increased set associativity of the Athlon core puts it at a huge advantage over PIII/P4 Xeon and Itanium. Two Athlon cores may well be the equivalent of 4 Xeon cores in this application. 4 Xeon cores can cache 32 LSB addresses. 2 Athlon cores can cache 36 LSB addresses (likely least significant byte or starting location on the page for each process). That fact would make SMP Athlon a pretty compelling solution for these servers, maybe enough to cause IBM to take this particular plunge. It's a surprising, almost unbelievable place for the initial use of a new chipset. But, in this increasingly cost conscious market, the price advantage of a dual Athlon system compared to a quad Xeon system must be enormous. If there's any truth to this story, it puts AMD in the enterprise server space, right off the bat. It may also cap Intel's progress into the enterprise space. What a high profile spot for AMD! If your front end systems go down, your cluster is off line. Some people are still leery of using Intel systems in such an application, much less AMD! Dan

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