Re: Can't claim credit, came by PM, "FLoperon"...
Keep laughing John, AMD's 4-way has 8 x 64-bit channels and their 8-way has 16 x 64-bit memory channels. Both are designed to be inexpensive to build, configure, and sell. Figure something like $5,000 to $10,000 for the 4-way and $10,000 to $20,000 as a selling price for a base 8 processor system. Memory bandwidth on the 8-way would be 42.6 gigabytes per second....
Intel's 8-way starts at $70,000, and that server has 2 memory channels yielding (or would yield if it had PC2700) 5.3 Gigabytes per second bandwidth.
It's starting to look like Intel's server business has been outclassed more by Opteron than Coppermine was by Athlon. AMD's midrange and high end server platforms completely overwhelms Intel's, and at a much lower cost. AMD is in a position to do to Intel what Intel did to SUN.
At the other end of the business, AMD will be buying Athlons from UMC for $25 and selling them for $50. AMD's SOI notebooks stand a good chance of significantly outperforming Intel's power hungry parts. Intel's mid range and high end desktop parts look reasonably competitive - but nobody will be willing to pay more than a bargain price for an old style, 32-bit processor by the middle of next year - not with Windows-64 out there for the power user.
It may be a little too soon to claim game, set, and match for AMD, but, strategically, Intel's paranoia is starting to look justified.
Intel has cut its burn rate down to $5,500,000,000 each quarter - that quarterly nut may start to look like a pretty tough one to make by the end of next year. |
