Compaq and Dell might be making Athlon MP announcements any day now: "Compaq and Dell? We're working with them," he claimed.
theinquirer.net
AMD, Compaq, Dell and SMP
Here we go again
By Andrew Thomas, 7 June 2001 06.01 BST
AMD'S top Euro Spin Paramedic, Robert Stead, hinted that Compaq and Dell might be making Athlon MP announcements any day now: "Compaq and Dell? We're working with them," he claimed.
Dell? We remain unconvinced, despite a lone analyst still claiming an AMD Dell notebook could still be on the cards.
The present list of Athlon MP system builders reads very much like a 'Who the Hell are they?' of the PC industry. While big names will no doubt follow, no corporate is going to trust its servers to system builders who sound like they employ two men and a dog and are based under a railway arch in North London.
With four and eight-way Athlon systems not expected until Q2 2002 with the release of the 64-bit Hammer family, the lucrative workstation and server market will remain firmly under Intel's control for some time to come.
Rather disingenuously, AMD suits claimed that the reason its benchmarks compared Athlon MP systems with ancient Pentium IIIs using the old i840 chipset was because 'we couldn't get hold of a dual Foster (Xeon) system to try'. (We found one - look here.)
Might we suggest that if AMD really wants to succeed in this market they try a little harder to test the - admittedly good - Athlon MPs against the actual systems they'll be up against in the real world? After all, if two-bit hardware sites can get hold of dual Foster boxes to play with, surely the World's number two chip maker should be able to do the same.
But then, of course, the benchmark results wouldn't have looked as impressive. |
