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

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (83046)	6/20/2002 12:19:56 PM
From: peter_luc	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Wanna_bmw, these are excellent points. Hammer is no home run for AMD. P4 is powerful and Itanium II (and forthcoming IA64 processors) will have very strong industry support. OTOH, AMD does not need to completely take over the high end to be successful. To take just a piece of the pie would already be a big success. So far, AMD has only a very small presence in the server market, not to talk about the high end server market. If Opteron can substantially brake into this area, even if it is only to a relatively minor extent, it will be a huge win for AMD. And it may do wonders for AMD's general reputation, which is of vital importance for the acceptance of AMD in the enterprise market. Peter

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (83046)	6/20/2002 9:32:26 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

wbmw, If Sledgehammer sells for half of that, then they cumulatively save $2400 on 4 processors, and maybe another $400 on the cost of the platform. Add 20% to that to make up for the difference in margin on the server and you get a cost savings of $3360. Seems like a good savings, but that still puts the price of the 4-way server at $36.6k, so the overall savings are about 8.5% (and this is with Sledgehammer at 1/2 the price of the lowest grade Itanium 2). I don't think Sledgehammer will be in $40,000 servers anytime soon or ever. I see Sledgehammer in low end 1 to 2-way servers, selling for $100 to $5,000, sith CPU prices initially between $500 and $1,000, later on falling to $200 to $500. For Itanium to be successful, it has to be competitive in this segment, to gain critical mass. $40,000 and higher price server segment is a shrinking niche, and everything that applise to this segment will be soon rendered irrelevant, as the x86 processors overrun the last lines of defense of these dying vendors, overrunning them without breaking any sweat. This niche was shrinking very fast, vendors disappearing one after another, and the dotcom boom temporarily slowed down the inevitable. Companies with funny money way over-speced, way overpaid for these dinosaurs, temporarily lifting Sun, as the last star of this dying galaxy. There are ways to achieve performance and reliability with standard x86 servers at fraction of prices, and with IT budgets under increasing scrutiny, it will he bard to slip in over-priced over-speced systems. As far as RISC software vendors not rewriting to x86, those who did not are mostly dead, and those who think they can survive by not rewriting to x86, but for another niche CPU - IA64 will soon be out of business too. Joe

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (83046)	6/20/2002 10:40:36 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Re: If Sledgehammer sells for half of that, then they cumulatively save $2400 on 4 processors, and maybe another $400 on the cost of the platform There was a pricelist for the Itanium chipset available, for a while and it was interesting. My recollection was that components (there are a number of support chips needed for each Itanium, not just a north bridge and a south bridge. Q1000 prices worked out to well over $1,000 per CPU. OEMs usually double prices (at least). The OEM BOM cost difference between Itanium and Opteron 4-way, for motherboard and CPUs, will likely be $10,000 vs. $3,000. For 8-way, $25,000 vs. $6,000. Similarly configured (with the same hot swap disk arrays and memory) 8-way Opterons will likely sell for less than 4-way Itaniums. 4-way Opteron will be much cheaper to produce than 4-way Itanium. The chipset docs are here: ftp://download.intel.com/design/Itanium/Downloads/24870301.pdf Look at pages 12 and 13 of the pdf. Besides the 4 Itaniums, it appears that in Itanium motherboard will require a SAC, SDC, GXB, PXB, PID, IFB, and WXB chip. Multiple MAC, MDC, and FWH chips are also required. Intel has invested design time, development time, and FAB time for each of these specialized components of the Itanium chipset. They've had to develop masks etc. for each one. The volume of each of these chips won't be very big for some time, depending on whether or not they intend to recover costs for the next few generation of Itanium, the components for an Itanium motherboard will be quite expensive. Opteron will also require several chips, but fewer, and simpler chips than Itanium. Opteron isn't just a less expensive chip to build and write software for, it's a less expensive hardware platform - which should make it practical for higher volume, low end servers, as well as high end servers. Dan