Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fyo who wrote (61205)	6/10/1999 12:22:00 AM
From: RDM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573901

<? If it is such a great number cruncher, why couldn't Digital sell more than 3 of them?> The CPU has always awesome, but too expensive. You can buy a workstation in Pentium class with dual processor for $3k-5K while the alpha workstation is closer to $12K and you do not get dual. Sure is is 50% faster for some jobs, but if you are developing technology targetted for Windows ultimately it just is too expensive. Large application servers with large Terabyte size disk farms, 10+ GB of RAM and multiple processeors really benefit from the current Alpha. These are users commonly use Oracle software for large database applications applications. In this case the disk system costs $200K and users do not care about the chip cost in their 8-way server since the rest of the system dominates. It not uncommon to budget 10-20% of the total system cost to the central processor and to buy the biggest one available with that budget.