Dear Saturn V And Mary:
You both are trying to push an untenable position. CPU's wholesale cost (that paid to a CPU vendor) do not make up 25% of a server's retail bill (that paid to the OEM for the overall server). That is what Mary claimed for an average system. I have not seen one system that supports that outrageous claim. Tony's claim that anything sold on a separate line that the server base box on the bill is not a part of a server's overall cost was even more rediculous. On many bills, extra memory, and CPU modules are on separate line items.
Look at this bill:
tpc.org
The CPU chips are on the "Cell Board with 4 PA-8600 552MHz Processors A5206A, Opt. 0D1 1 11,498 16 183,960". That means that the CPU chips cost less than $183,960. Total price of server hardware is $7,524,111. 183960/7524111 = 2.45%. Superdome is the top of the line HP9000 server cluster. Thus, CPU cost is less than 2.5%. Notice that the right to access those CPU chips are charged over a million dollars or almost 6x the cost of the CPUs. On most servers this charge is buried, kudos to HP for making it plain. This system is the 24x7 type with hot swap everything and dynamic targetted resource partioning. The only thing missing from this is the printers, network access hardware and tape libraries found in actual installations.
<sarcastic on>Yeah, its real hard to justify the 2% figure.<sarcastic off>
Pete |
