Dell to Use AMD Chips in its Servers 227
garfangle writes "Dell has decided to include AMD's Opteron processor in its product line of servers. This is the first time Dell has used AMD chips within its own Dell branded products (excluding the recently acquired Alienware computers)." From the News.com article: "The deal appears to be confined to servers at this point. The news came along with the release of Dell's earnings results, which were in line with the disappointing warning the company provided last week. Revenue was $14.2 billion, up 6 percent from last year, but net income slid 18 percent to $762 million. Several times during the last few years, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has hinted that the company was right around the corner from introducing products based on AMD's chips."
Yes, but when... (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple solution: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple solution: (Score:2)
I have no idea what's wrong with the stupid noisy-ass box vendors. My box is all OEM parts, freely available from Newegg. My CPUs run nice and cool. 105 and 107 at the moment, for example. So WTF?
Re:Simple solution: (Score:4, Interesting)
It's possible to get noisy boxes from vendors who build them from commodity parts, too. Some guys from a Scala vendor (we bought infochannel from 'em) brought in a couple of 4U systems that were meant to be designer workstations, where you create content. One of them, the one in my office, has to be on all the time because part of our service contract states that we have to use their hardware, which of course is just commodity stuff, and the network manager software is on my system.
Now of course this is braindead anyway, because the network manager component uses very standard protocols and needs only bandwidth and some disk space, it needs practically no CPU. I have an old Network Engines RoadsterLX box with a Celery 466 that could do the job more than adequately... not that I'm suggesting we use it, but we could get a cheapier dell 1U box and throw that into the mix.
Instead, what we got was some cheap-ass commodity hardware in a 4U rack case that, I shit you not, is at least as loud as the Sun 4/260 that I used to sit at. For those who don't know, that's a 12-slot VME deskside case, about the size of six extra-large pizza boxes stacked on top of one another, then turned sideways. (Note that I'm talking about actual pizza boxes, not Sun "pizza boxes".) That machine's power supply was about the size of one of those little HP Brio celeron-based POS PCs, or an SGI Indigo.
So an ordinary Pentium IV, an nVidia card of some sort (PCI-E), three hard drives, and a DVD-ROM, and it's got damn near enough fans to lift off and fly away... WTF?
Re:Simple solution: (Score:2)
Antec p180b case (fairly new on the market)
Tiger K8WE (S2877) [tyan.com]
(2) Opteron 270/275/280 chips
4GB RAM
WinXP Pro (32bit still, not comfortable with 64bit yet)
Probably a 500W P/S. Pair of 400GB PATAs and (4) 400GB SATAs.
Noise-wise it shouldn't be terribly bad. The current unit is crammed into a Antec Sonata case but with only (4) HDs. The big key is the 120mm fans i
Re:Yes, but when... (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind dell pricing on an AMD system though. I've got a precision 650 dual xeon that could use replacing in a year or two.
Re:Yes, but when... (Score:2)
J & N Computer Services [jncs.com]
Two dual-core Opteron 275s (i.e., quad core), 8 Gb ECC RAM, 1 Tb SATA HDD (RAID), 1 kW PSU, NVidia GeForce 6600, 19" LCD panel. $6k when I bought my machine last November.
Re:Yes, but when... (Score:2)
Now all they need is a server operating system. (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody company will eventually try it.
Re:Now all they need is a server operating system. (Score:2)
Re:Now all they need is a server operating system. (Score:2)
Re:Now all they need is a server operating system. (Score:2)
Hopefully they won't until after the source code audit is complete. Something like losing even a medium sized OEM is just the kind of thing that Microsoft would need to prompt them bring their full weight upon ReactOS.
LK
Devil? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Devil? (Score:5, Funny)
No, but he did just lose a snowball fight to Hitler...
Re:Devil? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Devil? (Score:3, Funny)
Well of course by Law God would win, but he wasn't in the snowball fight, now was he?
Re:Devil? (Score:3, Funny)
Only a Nazi would think that.
Re:Devil? (Score:2)
No, he was just Godwin's puppet. You invoked Godwin's Law, and, of course, Godwin won again.
That schmuck always wins.
Obligatory Firefly Quote (Score:2)
It's about time.. (Score:5, Interesting)
One has to wonder, however, will there be any financial reprocussions from Intel after the announcement of this deal? If so, would it only push Dell further into AMD's lap?
Re:It's about time.. (Score:2, Interesting)
The apocolypse is nigh... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The apocolypse is nigh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The apocolypse is nigh... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The apocalypse is nigh... (Score:3, Informative)
"Dell has agreed to use AMD" (Score:2)
I'm sure they found the processors... satisfactory.
Is it the first time ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it the first time ? (Score:3, Informative)
But will they change their mind... (Score:2)
Re:But will they change their mind... Nope (Score:2)
Great timing (Score:5, Funny)
As a former datacenter manager (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, use Itanic and bust on an Intel chip and get modded up around here, but Itaniums are good chips, and they have a market, but a fairly small one right now. They have up to 1.3GHz models that use less power than a Xeon. They use 62 Watts of power. Current Opterons use anywhere from 62 Watts to 110 Watts.
No, odds are you can't justify one in your home, but for high performance floating point apps that need high memory bandwidth, Itaniums are still pretty much #1.
Intel has been pretty aggressive in their power/flop ratio here lately and they are making excellent progress. Even crap chips from Intel such as the i860 turned into the Xscale processors.
I've been using Itaniums from two different vendors for almost 4 years now, and I have no regrets. Opterons are damn good chips. The HTX spec is excellent. But its difficult to say which one is better at this time. I believe that the compilers are better for Itaniums than Opterons, but I haven't looked very deep into the good compilers for Opterons and have run no benchmarks yet. Its a tough call, and the competition is great.
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:5, Insightful)
You should probably call up Intel and tell them to fix their spec sheets, because they seem to think that they're selling Itaniums clocked from 900MHz to 1.66GHz and draw anywhere from 90-122W.
AMD, on the other hand, has dual core Opterons clocked at 2.2GHz and drawing only 55W.
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, you're still looking at 62W for a single core part compared to 55W for a dual core. And looking a little further, it looks like AMD has added a new "EE" (energy efficient) line which run at 1.4GHz and draw only 30W.
And the memory bandwidth numbers aren't particularly interesting. They're advertising 10.6GB/s on desktop Pentium 4 boards as well (see the I975X chipset, for example), and the AMD AM2 socket chips coming out this month will have a 12.8GB/sec memory controller on-die.
The memory bandwidth provided by AMD solutions also scales with the number of processors, since you're adding an additional memory controller per processor. There are boards on the market now - like the Tyan Thunder K8QW - which boast 51.2GB/s aggregate memory bandwidth.
And the reason for different models is because, unlike Intel processors which plug into a shared bus, Opterons are have dedicated Hypertraport links between the processors. There's three lines - 1xx which has a single link and is designed for uniprocessor configurations, 2xx which has two links and is designed for dual processor configurations, and 8xx which has three links and supports four and eight processor configurations. On current parts, the individual links at 8GB/sec, which means 8xx parts have 24GB/sec in aggregate bandwidth.
That's going to change some next year, though, when they move to Hypertransport 3 (current chips use 1), which scale to a whopping 41.6GB/sec per link.
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:2)
Are you entirely sure about those numbers?
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:2)
Back-of-the-envelope:
Assume 100W difference per server, when active, no difference when idle, and active 50% of the time means 50W per server average. 2000 servers = 100KW difference in total draw. Wild guess electricity costs $0.10/KWhr (I'm in a different country and don't get commercial pricing) so that is $10/hr. *24*365 = $88000/yr. I haven't taken into account the airconditioning to get rid of this heat - say electricity plus capital for airconditioning is about half as much aga
lower powered ram 400w (Score:2)
Re:As a former datacenter manager (Score:2)
20K over 2000 servers over 3 years works out to less than a penny a day. These are negligible savings, if any. Just rearranging the wires in the cabinets a little to improve the airflow could give you such savings.
Marketing (Score:2)
Was is the operative word - the stuff coming out this summer is actually pretty decent.
But to answer your question - Marketing. Somebody in the DotCom era let the Marketing Department take ahold of engineering. MegaHertz, MegaHertz, MegaHertz were all that mattered. So you get the NetBurst strategy, very deep pipelines, awful prediction miss penalties, and 'who cares about power?'.
So customers like you went elsewhere. In dro
And only one FPU... (Score:2)
It works if your loads are cache-friendly (and thus memory friendly), and very seldom use any advanced instructions. (That means you're going to want a crypto offload card too...)
Basically it's good for running your web head ends... and maybe a terminal server. Or as an advanced routing platform. Maybe you'd consolidate and run all your LDAP repositories out of it. But its not a good choice for computatio
Dell is Doomed (Score:2, Funny)
Or was it Apple? Yes! This means Apple is Doomed!
Re:This might kill Apple. (Score:2)
It's funny the Dell finally agreed to use AMD when Intel is finally starting to catch up to AMD. Apple picked Intel because it was the best choice at the time, with the hope that it will continue to be a good choice. But if how quickly managed to switch
Oblig. Simpson's quote (Score:2)
That reminds me of a reporter's question at Krusty's retirement press conference:
It was actually 20 years ago for Krusty, but why didn't Intel use Opterons 20 months ago when they were clearly superior to Pentium 4-based Xeons, and Woodcrest was still pre-vapor? Woodcrest is supposed to ship next month. Maybe it's because of AMD's improved manufact
I will predict... (Score:2)
AMD 8131 PCI-X tunnel + NVidia 2200 MCP (and either a 2050 MCP or some Winbond BS)
This lets you leverage 4-way with PCI-X hanging off one socket's HT with PCIe and GIG-e hanging off the other.
On their uber big 4U systems they'll do the 8151 + 8131 deal w/o NVidia cuz "we don't need no PCIe".
And ServerWorks? I hope Dell knows to stay well enough away.
Ken Rollins On Bloomberg (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ken Rollins On Bloomberg (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year Dell started selling AMD CPUs. Boxed CPUs. Dell didn't make *ANY* computers those CPU's would fit in, but they offered the CPUs for sale. Why? It's incredably stupid to sell one upgrade component, that will only fit in your competitors machines, but not in your own, isn't it? So why? The only reason I can think of, is so that when Intel goes into court, and AMD tells the judge that Intel is using monopoly leverage on Dell so that Dell only uses Intel CPUs, Intel can say, 'well, Dell actually sells AMD CPU's as well'.
I can't imagine any other reason for doing that. But a judge will probably see through that quickly, so now we get a new announcement from Dell that they will build *some* AMD based servers. How many? Not many. Only at least 4-way servers. Why only 4-way servers when we the customers have been clamering for AMD for years? Because they can say they use AMD as well, without really touching Intel's market share. This one is all to make Intel look like less of a monopoly to the courts folks. Don't get your hopes up for AMD based Dell medium/small servers or desktops. It ain't gonna happen.
Stupid question... (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as I can tell, AMD CPUs these days are cheaper, more innovative, faster, and more power-efficient than Intel CPUs, in the budget, desktop, and server markets. I won't buy Intel anymore, my last 5 computers have been Athlon 64, Athlon XP, K6-3, K6-2, and Cyrix.
I'm aware that AMD has sometimes had problems supplying enough volume to customers, but is there any other downside? I mean, at work we have all these ugly-as-sin black Dell minitowers in te
Stupid question... (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, AMD CPUs these days are cheaper, more innovative, faster, and more power-efficient than Intel CPUs, in the budget, desktop, and server markets. I won't buy Intel anymore, my last 5 computers have been Athlon 64, Athlon XP, K6-3, K6-2, and Cyrix.
I'm aware that AMD has sometimes had problems supplying enough volume to customers, but is there any other downside? I mean, at work we have all these ugly-as-sin black Dell minitowers in te
Re:Stupid question... (Score:2)
With Dell, I can go and configure the server or workstation and get *exactly* what I want. I don't have to flip for hours through IBM or HP/Compaq websites trying to find a configuration that meets my needs. (Some companies have gotten better, but we've had good reliable hardware from Dell and have no reason to switch.)
In addition, their configuration page shows me exactly how much I'll
Re:Ken Rollins On Bloomberg (Score:2)
Circle (Score:3, Funny)
Apple switches from PowerPC to Intel
Dell switches from Intel to AMD
Now all that's needed is for slashdotters to switch from AMD to PowerPC and the circle is closed!
AMD Comment (Score:5, Informative)
2006-05-18 16:36 (New York)
Choice
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2006
AMD (NYSE:AMD) released the following statement today
regarding the announcement Dell Inc. made in its quarterly earnings
statement that it intends to offer AMD Opteron(TM) Dual Core
processor-based servers.
"We welcome Dell, and Dell customers, to the world of AMD64," said
Marty Seyer, AMD senior vice president, Commercial Business. "Dell is
a customer-focused company and we're pleased to see that they are
listening to their customers and providing them the choice of
innovative AMD products. We look forward to working closely with Dell
and bringing the benefits of AMD's leading performance-per-watt
solutions to Dell's customers.
First reaction was.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:First reaction was.... (Score:2)
At least we have Poland!
The right move at the wrong time. (Score:2)
Perfect game servers... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Perfect game servers... (Score:2)
AMD has sit on its laurels (Score:4, Informative)
1) Go to http://www.amd.com/ [amd.com]
2) Search for "Pacifica" (their upcoming enterprise technology for virtualization)
3) Click on the first link that their search engine returns ("AMD's Virtualization Solutions - Optimizing Enterprise Services")
You get a HTTP 404 error. It has been like this for two months now! What an embarrasment for their marketing dept...
And there's no mention of the estimated launch date of Pacifica processors anywhere on their site (or it's simply too hard to find). People are trying to make spending plans here and one can't get reliable information from AMD about one of its most important enterprise technologies planned for release this year!
They just look amateurish. Sad to say that, since they still have technological advantage over Intel and taking care of good marketing would seem to be a matter of some very simple steps.
Re:AMD has sit on its laurels (Score:2)
Nearly every server I purchase is intended to run multiple VMs from day one. It's understood; most services don't justify the exclusive resources (cost, space, heat, power, etc
So now we can order Dell AMD Linux servers (Score:3, Funny)
Say, that chimp's looking awful nice there
Somewhere in Wall Street (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Somewhere in Wall Street (Score:2)
AMD targets 50% of 4P market share in 2006 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AMD targets 50% of 4P market share in 2006 (Score:2)
Re:AMD targets 50% of 4P market share in 2006 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AMD targets 50% of 4P market share in 2006 (Score:2)
Note to Steve Jobs (Score:2)
I know places like Penguin Computing will sell me a 4 core Opteron workstation for $2500, but make it shiny and Macish and I'll happily pay $3000.
I am a mac fanboy.
Now back to agonizing over whether the wimpy graphics in the MacBook might actually be tolerable for the system which is otherwise a great deal. Oi!
Much ado about nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
Yay Opterons (Score:2)
Dude, you're getting a Dell!!! (Score:2)
The fact that they are THIS LATE to the game on AMD, and that this is the ONLY AMD OPTION they are selling just goes to show you that they are no longer the market leader, and probably never will be ag
Limited use yes, but in Dell's highest end product (Score:3, Insightful)
Dell's not announcing anything lower than the four cpu servers, but given the situation, Dell has no choice but to take baby steps. We're talking about huge volumes of chips in Dell's mainstream lines, so a little caution is reasonable! Nevertheless, now that Dell uses AMD chips, the next guessing game becomes "How long until their customers force Dell to get AMD 2-way servers (or maybe 64bit laptops)?". I'm thinking less than a year. They've already taken the hardest step of ditching the exclusivity with Intel. There's no real reason to hold back now.
I Smell Scam (Score:2)
What this means for AMD (Score:5, Interesting)
People bemoan the lack of AMD in the server/laptop Dell space but consider what this looks like to anyone buying from Dell: "You can either buy these cheap but 'good enough' Intel servers, or you can upgrade and buy this premium AMD box". In the end, people prefer switching to a "higher quality" brand rather than a "price aware" brand: isn't it hard to defend taking anyone to McDonald's when there's a much better but slightly more expensive restaurant next door?
Re:Intel wall starting to crumble (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Intel wall starting to crumble (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Intel is coming back with some impressive new technology so the battle ahead looks good for us!
Re:Intel wall starting to crumble (Score:4, Informative)
I assume they planned in advance for this, since if the Dell deal didn't go through, they could cancel the Cartred deal without having tons of spare capacity on thier hands.
With 20/20 hindsight, looking at AMD's Chartred plans, it should have been pretty obvious that AMD had a big customer lined up. Too bad I didn't have that foresight, otherwise I could have made some good cash on AMD stock.
Re:Intel wall starting to crumble (Score:2)
For the really Lazy (Score:5, Funny)
Why was this modded offtopic? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why was this modded offtopic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because no one cares that you took a bath in the stock market due to giving up on their favorite processor-selling corporation?
Now, if you had told us you dumped your stock because you assumed this was never going to happen or something, it would be on topic. And we'd all be laughing at you. More than we already are, I mean.
Re:Reuters got it wrong (Score:2)
Re:Reuters got it wrong (Score:2)
Uhhh... Apple is still selling systems with PowerPC processors. Granted, it's only one line (the G5) but it's still for sale.
I guess that means you don't know what the hell you're talking about?
Re:Reuters got it wrong (Score:2)
PC = Windows machine (and maybe Linux if they're a bit knowledgable)
Apple != Mac/OS X, i.e. not PC
It seems like the term PC is coloquial context shift from "Personal Computer" to "Computer Primarily Running Windows".
Not saying I agree with it, but it seems to be a reality.
Re:Reuters got it wrong (Score:3, Funny)
You just now figured that out?
Re:Reuters got it wrong (Score:2)
To further defend that statement, there really aren't many major pc makers any more. It's basically HP, gateway, dell and now Apple... Apple only has similar numbers to gateway, the smallest of the big three.
YOU got it wrong (Score:2)
PC = "Personal Computer".
These happened to exist long before the x86 series of processors and it PCs will continue to exist long afterward.
Its just a sad coincidence that most PCs lately are using x86 processors....
Re:Yay!! (Score:4, Funny)
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again. Fool me a third time with an Alienware merger... yeah, shame on me. Meet the new box, same as the old box. Won't get fooled again.
Re:Yay!! (Score:2)
Why you are not modded +5 funny is a mystery.
Re:Yay!! (Score:2)
Your sig is a direct quote from RUSH?!?!
I hope you are Canadian...that would be the only explanation.
Re:Wohoo (Score:3, Informative)
AMD has just released recently a low-power Athlon line - but
Re:Wohoo (Score:2)
What sort of insane rambling is this? I've seen AMD's line of processors drop from under 100w (Athlon 64) to 25w (Turion MT)! That's not a 'consistent' increase in power consumption! Their new TL line may consume 35w, but that is consistent with the ML line!
. "it looks more like a patch than a semi-rearchitecture like the core is"
Intel is STILL rearchitecturing it's current gen processors, because the P4 architecture was a piece of garbage.
Re:Wohoo (Score:2)
Next time you complain, I suggest you read your sig.
Re:Wohoo (Score:2)
Why not stop using your K6-III and get up to date?
Tom
Re:Wohoo (Score:2)
Re:Wohoo (Score:3, Informative)
I'm running at stock speeds and voltages. Here are my temp readings while idle and after playing oblivion for 2 hours:
Re:Good news to me. (Score:2)
Re:Good news to me. (Score:2)
You really DO get what you pay for in the high end server market.