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To: Tony Viola who wrote (139008)	7/10/2001 8:48:44 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel Stops Shipment of Flawed Chip SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) stopped shipping a powerful chip for servers in April because of a flaw in its design, the company said Tuesday. The problem has been fixed, and production is scheduled to resume next month. The problem with the 900-megahertz Pentium 3 Xeon chip can cause servers to freeze up and temporarily stop working, Intel spokesman Robert Manetta said. No server users have been affected - the flaw was found in a lab by a customer in March, Manetta said. ``Just to be safe, we did stop the shipments,'' he said. The Pentium 3 Xeon chip is not the fastest Intel chip for servers, but it has extra memory. Manetta would not disclose how many of the chips have been sold, but he said the halt in shipments is not material to Intel's business. In the meantime, Intel customers - server manufacturers - can switch to a 700-megahertz Xeon chip or wait until the fixed 900-megahertz models come out in August. Intel shares lost $1.11, nearly 4 percent, to $27.79 on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Tuesday. The stock was up to $27.99 in extended trading.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (139008)	7/10/2001 8:50:40 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: Considering the amount of time and effort it takes to validate server platforms on a new speed grade Ummm, what would be a more appropriate category for a SAN? PDA? Productivity Software? Workstation? I can follow your argument that Oracle software might get broken out of server costs as software (though I'd beg to differ), but disk storage? Whether it's in the same box as the CPU, or in an adjacent box shared between several CPUs, the server's disk storage is as good a candidate for "server costs" as is CPU. Regards, Dan

To: Tony Viola who wrote (139008)	7/10/2001 8:52:12 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony,<<<So, out of a $6M+ server, CPU chips cost less than $128K or about 2%>>> First, he overstates the cost of the server within a complete client server system used to benchmark OLTP (Online (real time) transaction processing system) by more than 100%, and then he understates the list price of the processors by 389% to make some point that Intel will not profit much in the server market. All I have to say is that Jeremiah Sanders must be some real charismatic personality to have such fervant and loyal following. When it comes to charisma, Sanders wins hands down against Craig Barrett. Barrett can't even get his paid PR spokes person to state the Intel case. FWIW, Mary

To: Tony Viola who wrote (139008)	7/10/2001 9:08:01 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dear Tony: It is sold as server hardware. A server is not much good if it includes no hard disk or memory. To attach hard disk, you need controllers, PCI buses, cables, power supplies, and the places to put them either cases, cabinets, or racks. Sorry, server hardware includes these things. In the old days, the disk drives, and tape drives are included in the price because it was all proprietory. In the case of the GS320, they used both SCSI and Fibre channel connects. Heck, they had over 100 FC controllers in their submission. Remember this is an enterprise database server, not a silly one man web server PC. To get high TPCm's, you need high amounts of data in the database. Disk is mandatory for such a server unless you want to use all SDRAM instead at a far higher cost (more performance though). The NICs and switch connect the DB server to the front end concentrators (those PCs acting like 10K clients / users). The $6+M does not even include the concentrator systems. Heck to get 600+ ethernet segments requires a lot of hubs, switchers, routers, and scads of cables, power packs, and sheer space in any typical environment. And none of the that is included in the submission price. Besides, they could not get these TPCs using network attached storage (the traffic is way too high for even 1000BT (100 MB/sec vs 160 MB/sec)). Fibre Channel is not considered NAS since it is just like SCSI in that the requests generally originate from the controller not an internal CPU. Those cabinets are simply place to put the drives and the redundant PSs to power them. The drives will not read or write without the FC controller and the controllers are in the server cabinet. If you take out all 32 CPUs, will the drives do anything? No, they won't. But Network attached storage drives will boot the NAS server box, perform backups (if there is a tape drive), and a host of other tasks. All the unattached FC drives will do is a POST followed by eventual return to idle state. Even if it is in SANs, it still in servers and part of the submission as server hardware. You really must not have a clue as to how these things are put together, do you? Even the submitted price is light. You do not backup 3TB of disk with a single 20GB drive. It is not fast enough to do a backup in the required time of a few hours (it would take at least 450 hours not including loading and unloading of tapes). There are ways to shrink it, but not by two orders of magnitude. This server would not be used in a 24-7 lights out operation (missing hot backup, redundacy, tape library (150 tape cart. autoloaders are rare and even then are typically called tape libraries), and UPS). Pete