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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (41388)	5/28/2001 1:01:12 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Tony: Even by Anand's benchmarks in DB serving, a single Tbird beats 2 way P3, thus, a dual 1.2 Tbird beats a 4 way P3. Therefore, companies can buy dual Athlon servers that outperform 4 way P3 servers and with 1.4 Tbirds on the way, even 4 way P4 servers. The bottleneck for the 2 and 4 way P3s and P4s is that they share the bus bandwidth where 2 way Athlons do not. Besides, most DBs are sped up by Beowulf type clusters in most over SMP boxes due to these being IO bound mostly. Again, just look at Anand's server cluster. AMD will take the dual workstation market away from Intel since they were already taking market share with single CPUs already. Pete

To: Tony Viola who wrote (41388)	5/28/2001 1:06:18 PM
From: that_crazy_doug	Respond to of 275872

<< I agree, to the positive side because of Foster, Blades with Tualatin and Itanium, and no significant AMD effect this year. Also, Feds lowering rates are starting to kick in and help the server biz recover. You're far too early with this premise of yours. Be happy with Athlon's desktop success and hope for notebooks progress. Intel is considered far too key of an alliance partner, and has all the products hands down, and years of experience, for the OEMs to use AMD as a wedge. >> In general I agree. I don't think Intel will be forced to alter server pricing in the near future. The interesting timing will be when p3 derivitives no longer cut the mustard performance wise. This may be true in the somewhat near future, and it may not be true for many years (for all i know we could get 2-4 ghz p3s), but once Intel is forced to go to the p4 as a server part, I think many people will consider an athlon alternative. The p4 for a wide variety of reasons may make a poor server chip. (it's performance is largely hit or miss, and may not be good for servers which people are probably hoping for more stable performance). The platform will be newer then the athlon platform, and so it likely won't be as stable. The thermal/power requirements of the chip may cause additional problems. Still, I'd hardly expect Intel to gain revenue here. Even if Athlon barely dents the market, even some dent will detract from their revenue. Plus it just seems like demand will be remain soft so YOY comparissons probably won't look good regardless of AMD's impact on the situation.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (41388)	5/28/2001 11:51:34 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Tony, There is no competition in 4s and up, so why lower there? I think there is a huge gap in our perceptions, and maybe I am missing something. What exactly goes into this 4 way server that's different from 2-way? Chipset (Serverworks), motherboard (OEM, based on Serverworks chipset), plus some chips that cost pennies that reside on the motherboard, bunch of fans, etc. What does Intel provide other than the CPU? I understand that Intel has some server chipsets and motherboards (which are not very popular), but the bulk of servers, I think there is even an acronym (which I can't recall) for these mass market servers sold by Compaq, HP, IBM and Dell, they all use Serverworks chipsets. So from Intel's point of view, there is no difference between say Compaq selling 2 2-way or 1 4-way server. I know the prices of these servers are high, but most of it goes into a fat margin for the OEM, plus additional R&D, Q&A that the OEM has to put into these. All it comes down to is Intel supplying a component that goes into these machines. And the component is more or less the same as the one that goes into the 1-2-way servers, where Intel will face competition. I have a feeling that Intel will do everything it can to protect this market segment from competition, but once the incumbancy and various arm twisting is overcome, and the competing servers based on Athlons are introduced, Intel will end up having to use the pricing to blunt the assault of the competition, just like what Intel did in desktop segment. Anyway, what I am describing will probably happen over the period of 1 to 2 years (not 1 to 2 weeks as some on this thread probably expect) AMDs perennial problems with infrastructure: chipsets, mobos, are legend, plus the fact that end users are companies instead of home users with a good percentage of gamers, overclockers and "I hate Intel" types. You don't get that in corporate PC or server customers, and AMD isn't even into corporate desktop or notebooks, which are sometimes considered to be a prerequisite to servers. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that these people (IT managers) are not spending their own money, and there is not much benefit in sticking your neck out to save the company some money on something that's unusual, and may be perceived as higher risk. Joe