Thus the catch 22 that AMD cannot penetrate the corporate market because...
I don't think this is a catch-22. I think the problem is that a top-tier vendor is not able to offer a complete suite of products based on Athlon - eg., quad-proc (or higher) machines, machines with large built-in cache (XEON style) etc. If AMD's offerings covered the full spectrum, then I am sure one of the top-tier vendors would realize that hey, I can offer my entire suite of products that has a better price/performance than anybody else by switching to AMD, and they would. As it stands now, a top-tier vendor would have to invest in AMD design for some lower-end server products, but be forced to invest in Intel designs for the high end. This double-engineering is costly (think support, design, spare part inventories, etc.)
This is why I feel mobile Palomino is soooo critical to AMD. With mobile Palomino, a top-tier vendor will be able to offer a complete range of laptop products built on AMD chips (thin&light, desktop replacement, etc.). AMD has this window right now to equal and actually improve on Intel's offerings.
It is because of this window that I think the absence of the Palomino is due to some real problem - whether its compatibility with some version of an OS, or whatever. This is probably why they can keep demo'ing the darn thing by just ensuring that they contain the demo to avoid whatever snag they have.
Milan |
