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

To: tecate78732 who wrote (257568)	12/26/2008 9:09:18 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Intelbuyer: Since when do EE's buy mainframes? Workstations maybe. Perhaps at Big Oil companies in the oil exploration division to process seismic data although they likely use supercomputers for that. And even there we have heard of upgrades of the CPUs. Red Storm went from dual core Windsors to quad core Barcelonas and then had those replaced by the fixed ones later. They may upgrade to Shanghais now that they are out. A good deal of the cost is in the interconnect, the memory, the disk and the software. TACC did the same. What you haven't yet figured out is that the price of the server matters in when upgrades are preferred to buying new. Very few x86 servers get that big. But their size is growing. Think about what was the largest single server you have seen purchased? How much did it cost? The largest I have seen directly is a $1.2 million server. Two were purchased one being the main unit and the other used for warm backup/testing and that price did not include the service contract. Each had about $650K in support hardware. The service contract ran near to a million dollars for 5 years of 24/7 support. The software that they would run cost about $15 million including customization and support. The total purchase was just over $20 million including installation. Two years later they upgraded the processor cards to get 50% more performance for about $250K for both servers. IBM gave them a price equal to the discounted difference between the cards prices at the time of the order. That definitely was cheaper than buying another $1.2 million server plus $650K of support hardware, the extra service contract and installation. And that would still leave the warm backup server not be able to handle the new server's load, if it failed. Any company that does look at TCO, would do that upgrade over purchasing a new server. Pete