Petz,
Compaq's Mary McDowell, VP and GM of their Industry Standard Server Group, has continually said Compaq looks at all server chip contenders, but that they will stay all Intel, at least for now.
The Xeon line makes a lot of money for Intel and x86 servers are not going away for at least 3 years, more if Intel does i86-64. Probably these will be sold under the Compaq line.
... until they switch to Hammer, because it's price/performance is 2X better.
The CPU chip or the finished server 2X better? Whichever, we have quite a while to find out, don't we? Actually, Compaq has some serious cost management to do on their mid-range servers, as IBM just released an 8 way new Xeon MP based at about $50K, about half the price of Compaq's 8 way with older PIII Xeons. Maybe they will look at Hammer again. Then again, Compaq will be right on the heels of IBM, releasing their own Xeon MP based, then McKinley, so when/how do they fit in AMD??? Oh, 1 and 2 ways? They have P4 Prestonias coming out in a whole line to replace the PIII based small servers. Will Compaq cancel all of these? Just don't see Compaq throwing all that development time and money away to start over.
Tony |
