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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (96457)	3/3/2000 12:23:00 AM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572098

"Well, why does Compaq keep pumping out more and more 2, 4 and 8-way XEON systems while getting ready for Merced and McKinley systems with 32 to 256 CPUs?" Because that is what the unwashed masses demand. Point me to a reference where Compaq is getting ready for anything beyond 4 CPUs with Merced in them. Maybe you missed the exchange Tench and I had recently where we did agree that Compaq is doing a 4-way Merced , not 8-way and from Tench's perspective this is because there aren't any 8-way Merced chipsets on the horizon... 8-way chipsets show up with McKinley... theregister.co.uk "Paul Santeler, VP of Compaq's x86 enterprise server division is perfectly sanguine about where Intel's Itanium microprocessor stands, at least in the Houston roadmap." ... "He said Compaq will bring Itanium to market in a four way system first, and targeted specifically at specialised markets. Compaq will use an eight way system based on Foster (Willamette) and then will migrate that model to the future Intel McKinley model. Interesting. Compaq reckons there is so much growth in the eight way market, as its sales figures have proved, that it makes more sense to migrate the eight way model to McKinley, kind of leaving Itanium for the Itaniates." --- So maybe Compaq has it wrong... but I don't think so... The one question Tench would never answer (because you really have to put yourself in a "Dorothy" mindset .. i.e. close your eyes and click your heels and tell yourself what you want to believe and poof it will happen) is: "What OS will be running in October 2000 and who is the sucker to buy it?" Brand new platform, no app availability (few) and when you get right down to it its performance will suck compared to shipping IA32 from Intel and AMD. Its a development platform... a niche product and now McKinley is the great hope. Great floating point for Intel (whoop) but badly lagging Willamette and Athlon in transaction horsepower. Think about it.. if that wasn't the case , it would be much more than "a specialized" server, wouldn't it? Rob