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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (257429)	12/16/2008 5:54:10 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Joe: Because Xeon 5570 won't be out long enough to be trusted. It takes 1 year to validate a new platform. Guess what? Core i7 is a new platform. The current Opteron server platform has been out for 2+ years. That is that TTM that is in Opteron's favor for the next year after multi-socket core i7 comes out. By making Shanghai Opteron a drop-in replacement, OEM server makers don't have to go through the year long IT validation requirement, its just an upgrade on an existing platform. With Core i7, its a new CPU, new platform, new socket, new BIOS, new memory and new chipset. Thus it has to go through the hard year long IT testing in the customer's environment to make sure it works with all existing software and hardware. Any unresolved hiccups and it could be blacklisted. Doing twice the performance means less than nothing, if one calculation is wrong or any data is corrupted. If it happens to Shanghai, the IT testers know it was on a known good platform, chipset, memory and all of the other things. Since only the CPU and perhaps the BIOS were changed, any problems have to be in those two. When the new chipset and MB changes, they will know that the CPU, memory and other hardware are known good and they could go through an expedited process for the rest (3 months or so). When the socket changes to G34, that may cause a full validation again as the CPU, BIOS, platform and memory changes. If Shanghai is used in the first ones, that may still change to just an expedited validation as the CPU and the other hardware are known good. IT people like slow incremental grandfathering changes. It makes testing and validation much easier and less risky. Both OEMs and their customers prefer it so ask their suppliers for it. Which is why AMD goes that route. It is the major reason why the original Opteron became such a success, it required no changes to the existing software to work, even though it was a new CPU, BIOS, platform and chipset. It still went through the one year IT validation testing, but had a lot of new pilot projects using 64 bit apps trying it out. That those were successful helped boost its acceptance. Pete