Mary,
You wrote "I didn't mean to imply that they could replace an IBM series 390 computer with a current Xeon or Athlon Server"
Why not? If you are doing something CPU intensive, an Athlon or PIII blows away the mainframe.
You wrote "I don't know exactly what IBM revenues are from their AS400 line of computer, but I think the number is huge."
How does this help Intel? The vast majority of the revenue is not for the CPUs.
You wrote "I think IBM mainframe sales are greater than total AMD revenues"
They almost surely are. I fail to see the point. The vast majority of the mainframe dollars have nothing to do with the cost of the CPUs.
You wrote "I can't imagine that you could replace a $10M IBM System 390 with a 2 way Athlon server or even anything in the Xeon family."
I configured a top of the line Dell server tonight. It cost $210,000. It has much more memory than the $10,000,000 mainframe. It has significantly more CPU power than the $10,000,000 mainframe. There are people that buy those kind of boxes instead of mainframes. And Intel gets all of $20,000 when someone buys that instead of a $10,000,000 mainframe.
So for the sake of argument, let's assume IBM sells $10B worth of mainframes a year, and Intel convinces everyone to buy Xeon boxes instead. Intel would then destroy IBM's mainframe business and Intel would gross an extra 20 million a year because of it.
Look, I work with mainframes for a living and I would love nothing more than to offload _everything_ we do to PCs. Current PCs could do it, for a tiny fraction of what our current hardware costs. But it would take us a decade to port all of our S/390 assembler code to the PC.
Now if Intel will show up and give us $50,000,000 to pay for the port of all our mainframe assembler software to IA-64, I'm sure we would be happy to buy $20,000 worth of processors from them. I'm not so sure Intel would like the deal<G>.
Mike |
