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

To: tecate78732 who wrote (257470)	12/20/2008 7:16:31 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

INTC was a major part of my portfolio from 1998 until 2004, while I have only dabbled in AMD. I have great respect both for Intel's technology and management - we need only look at their rapid shift from Netburst/Itanium to Core/Xeon to see how quickly they can do a near complete reset of their strategy and come up with winners. The conversations about Intel and AMD were at a holiday party for a bunch of us database jocks. While we may not quite be "chip-heads", many of us are involved with cutting edge large scale datacenters in one way or another. I doubt there is much anti-Intel bias in that group - Intel is a good friend to most of us, and helps both with engineering and evaluation hardware. A number of us have had access to Nehalem prototype systems for a while now. While I can't go into detail, I can say that they are fast, fairly stable, and are a big step up in both power usage and control of power envelope. So I'm not saying Nehalem is not going to be a great product - but I don't think it is an across the board walk-away, and there are important workloads where (at least in current state) it is not superior to current shanghai products. In particular, at lower levels of processor utilization, Nehalem power management gets to a lower number, but for workloads with higher levels of average utilization (which is after all the goal of virtualization), AMD power envelope looks a little better. So based on real world experience of me and some colleagues, I have to question wbmw's assertion that it will be several years before AMD has competitive server product. They have currently shipping product which is very competitive for important workloads now. They also support up to 8 way today, and have both SE (higher speed) and EE (lower power) processors on their near term roadmap. Since this is a forum for AMD investors, I think it is important to maintain a realistic view of the competitive landscape. The full range of Nehalem products will not be broadly available for a while, perhaps not until second half, while AMD has that range now. Even without the macro economic situation, which may change buying decision criteria, 2009 promises to be a much more interesting market for server technology than wbmw's post suggested.