Fellow AMD admirers ;-),

Googling to see what anybody had to say about intel and cis turned up
this bit on AMD

http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/28/tech...estor/hellweg/

"AMD caught Intel pretty good with Opteron," says David Wu, an analyst
with Global Crown Partners. "If AMD can't beat Intel with Opteron, I
don't know if they ever will."

I'm going to get beaten up for it, but I don't think Opteron changed
the lowdown on AMD: very smart company, tries hard, never comes up
with anything really new.

Make Intel's life miserable with 64-bit x86? Score. Big win for end
users.

Break Intel's effective monopoly? Not that way. Okay, maybe not any
way, certainly not any way I can think of.

RM

Robert Myers wrote:
> Fellow AMD admirers ;-),
>
> Googling to see what anybody had to say about intel and cis turned up
> this bit on AMD
>
> http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/28/tech...estor/hellweg/
>
> "AMD caught Intel pretty good with Opteron," says David Wu, an
analyst
> with Global Crown Partners. "If AMD can't beat Intel with Opteron, I
> don't know if they ever will."

You gotta really differentiate where your quote of the article ends and
where your own opinion starts. I was thinking the below quote was from
the article.

> I'm going to get beaten up for it, but I don't think Opteron changed
> the lowdown on AMD: very smart company, tries hard, never comes up
> with anything really new.

On purpose, it wants to create practical stuff that the market will
accept. Unlike hopeless science projects like Itanium.

> Make Intel's life miserable with 64-bit x86? Score. Big win for end
> users.

Well, it has managed to marginalize Itanium effectively. No way Itanium
will ever make it out of its niches now.


> Break Intel's effective monopoly? Not that way. Okay, maybe not any
> way, certainly not any way I can think of.

Well, it was never going to break into Dell no matter what. However,
AMD does need to spend some money on marketing itself. There's simply
no other way around it. Intel will always be able to sell more than AMD
with inferior products, simply on the power of marketing.

Yousuf Khan

On 3 Mar 2005 13:15:55 -0800, "YKhan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Robert Myers wrote:
>> Fellow AMD admirers ;-),
>>
>> Googling to see what anybody had to say about intel and cis turned up
>> this bit on AMD
>>
>> http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/28/tech...estor/hellweg/
>>
>> "AMD caught Intel pretty good with Opteron," says David Wu, an
>analyst
>> with Global Crown Partners. "If AMD can't beat Intel with Opteron, I
>> don't know if they ever will."
>
>You gotta really differentiate where your quote of the article ends and
>where your own opinion starts. I was thinking the below quote was from
>the article.
>
As you know, I usually use html-like notation <quote>,</quote> to set
off extended quotes. I this particular case, it was a short quote,
and the quote itself was a quote. I won't do it again.

>> I'm going to get beaten up for it, but I don't think Opteron changed
>> the lowdown on AMD: very smart company, tries hard, never comes up
>> with anything really new.
>
>On purpose, it wants to create practical stuff that the market will
>accept. Unlike hopeless science projects like Itanium.
>
Oh, hmmm. Was Itanium a science project? Intel certainly wanted to
make a big score, and I applaud them for thinking they were doing the
right science, no matter how inaccurate their prognostication turned
out to be. The issue they thought they could see, the compiler
problem, turned out to be harder than they thought. The biggest
mistake I fault them on is that they seem to have lost control of the
complexity of the architecture: way too many features, all of which
had to be supported in hardware and, even more important, in exception
and recovery code.

As to practical stuff vs. science projects, that's why I admire intel.
I admire their stubbornness. I'm an IBM admirer, too. To the extent
that IBM has gotten more "practical," they've lost my respect, even if
I understand that they've had very little choice.

The industry, Yousuf, is going to choke on its own vomit. More, more,
more x86? Same old bugs. Same old windoze. Same old creaky
infrastructure. It takes an Intel or an IBM to break molds. AMD
never.

>> Make Intel's life miserable with 64-bit x86? Score. Big win for end
>> users.
>
>Well, it has managed to marginalize Itanium effectively. No way Itanium
>will ever make it out of its niches now.
>
Oh, who knows really. I have a hard time visualizing how Itanium will
survive in a niche, to be honest. If it does, it will eventually
break out of the niche. You think if the big boyz are using Power and
Itanium, your local bit-jockey won't want to be able to say he's doing
the same, if the price is right?

>
>> Break Intel's effective monopoly? Not that way. Okay, maybe not any
>> way, certainly not any way I can think of.
>
>Well, it was never going to break into Dell no matter what. However,
>AMD does need to spend some money on marketing itself. There's simply
>no other way around it. Intel will always be able to sell more than AMD
>with inferior products, simply on the power of marketing.
>
That whole deal is going to fall apart when one of the operatives
carrying messages written on flash paper back and forth between Santa
Clara and Round Rock is intercepted by AMD agents.

RM

Robert Myers wrote:
> >You gotta really differentiate where your quote of the article ends
and
> >where your own opinion starts. I was thinking the below quote was
from
> >the article.
> >
> As you know, I usually use html-like notation <quote>,</quote> to set
> off extended quotes. I this particular case, it was a short quote,
> and the quote itself was a quote. I won't do it again.

This where Firefox and Thunderbird really make this stuff easier for
you. There are various extensions available for them, that automate
this process.

> >> I'm going to get beaten up for it, but I don't think Opteron
changed
> >> the lowdown on AMD: very smart company, tries hard, never comes up
> >> with anything really new.
> >
> >On purpose, it wants to create practical stuff that the market will
> >accept. Unlike hopeless science projects like Itanium.
> >
> Oh, hmmm. Was Itanium a science project? Intel certainly wanted to
> make a big score, and I applaud them for thinking they were doing the
> right science, no matter how inaccurate their prognostication turned
> out to be. The issue they thought they could see, the compiler
> problem, turned out to be harder than they thought. The biggest
> mistake I fault them on is that they seem to have lost control of the
> complexity of the architecture: way too many features, all of which
> had to be supported in hardware and, even more important, in
exception
> and recovery code.
>
> As to practical stuff vs. science projects, that's why I admire
intel.
> I admire their stubbornness. I'm an IBM admirer, too. To the extent
> that IBM has gotten more "practical," they've lost my respect, even
if
> I understand that they've had very little choice.
>
> The industry, Yousuf, is going to choke on its own vomit. More,
more,
> more x86? Same old bugs. Same old windoze. Same old creaky
> infrastructure. It takes an Intel or an IBM to break molds. AMD
> never.

X86's problems weren't really software, but hardware. Itanium did
nothing to make hardware any better. Itanium was continuing on with the
same old shared bus architecture that Intels have always had, despite
the fact that they were starting with a brand new software
architecture.

Yousuf Khan

YKhan wrote:
snip
>
>
> X86's problems weren't really software, but hardware. Itanium did
> nothing to make hardware any better. Itanium was continuing on with the
> same old shared bus architecture that Intels have always had, despite
> the fact that they were starting with a brand new software
> architecture.
>
> Yousuf Khan
>

I would disagree. Getting rid of shared FSB not a problem, not that big
of a deal. Although getting the board manufacturers to stop using junk
board material and learn how to control impedance is a different story.
And high speed link boards need controlled impedance.

In my opinion the real problem with Itanium is that its objectives had
nothing to do with the customers/users objectives. They (customers) had
no reason to embrace Itanium.

Put on your customer hat, of whatever persuasion. Try to think of a
real reason any end user would be desirous of using Itanium, as actually
delivered at the time it was delivered.

del cecchi

On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 11:35:55 -0600, Del Cecchi
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

<snip>

>
>In my opinion the real problem with Itanium is that its objectives had
>nothing to do with the customers/users objectives. They (customers) had
>no reason to embrace Itanium.
>
Intel pursued the VLIW-like architecture for the same reason IBM
worked Daisy: the superchip to subsume all other chips. With
virtualization and whatever RAS needed to make it acceptable to IBM
and its mainframe-type customers, Itanium was to replace _everything_,
I think.

Opteron really has put Itanium into a no-man's-land: squeezed between
a very capable x86 and an actual mainframe manufacturer (ibm) that's
apparently not interested in abandoning its own architecture.

Had it worked, itanium would have satisfied customers' needs nicely: a
chip that would execute non-native binaries (including 360 and x86),
mainframe features, and a variety of vendors to choose from
("industry-standard architecture," in intel's code phrase).

>Put on your customer hat, of whatever persuasion. Try to think of a
>real reason any end user would be desirous of using Itanium, as actually
>delivered at the time it was delivered.
>
Oh, well, now that "as actually delivered" is a problem! x86
emulation never worked the way it was supposed to.

RM

On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:09:25 -0500, Robert Myers <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>Fellow AMD admirers ;-),
>
>Googling to see what anybody had to say about intel and cis turned up
>this bit on AMD
>
>http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/28/tech...estor/hellweg/
>
>"AMD caught Intel pretty good with Opteron," says David Wu, an analyst
>with Global Crown Partners. "If AMD can't beat Intel with Opteron, I
>don't know if they ever will."
>
>I'm going to get beaten up for it, but I don't think Opteron changed
>the lowdown on AMD: very smart company, tries hard, never comes up
>with anything really new.
>
>Make Intel's life miserable with 64-bit x86? Score. Big win for end
>users.
>
>Break Intel's effective monopoly? Not that way. Okay, maybe not any
>way, certainly not any way I can think of.

Christ it's IDF week Robert - plenty of bull excrement to go around.
Amusing to watch Goldman Sachs grovel and lick the boots at the feet of
their favorite hero though. Hey I thought we were supposed to get an
official name for "Desktrino" this week. Did I miss it in all the
excitement?:-)

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 05:34:54 -0500, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:


<snip>

>
>Christ it's IDF week Robert - plenty of bull excrement to go around.
>Amusing to watch Goldman Sachs grovel and lick the boots at the feet of
>their favorite hero though.

What's good for Intel is good for the country, you know, George. ;-).

Some part of me wondered whether AMD could break into Dell. All other
considerations aside, it's not like Dell to add unnecessary
complication to its life. I'm sure they looked at how many sales they
might lose vs. the engineering costs and decided it wasn't worth it.
However that calculation came out, I'm sure they used it to squeeze
Intel a little harder.

The fact that Dell holds the line makes life much tougher for AMD, and
if Opteron with Intel scrambling in the dust didn't do it, I don't
know what would.

>Hey I thought we were supposed to get an
>official name for "Desktrino" this week. Did I miss it in all the
>excitement?:-)

I'm more interested in where Intel is headed with interconnect.
Mellanox is now selling 10Gb/s infiniband adapters for $69 in
quantity:

http://www.mellanox.com/news/press/pr_030105.html

And there will be native support at least in Windows 2003 cluster
edition:

http://www.mellanox.com/news/press2004.html

But if it's a _mellanox_ i/o adapter, it's not part of the
_intel_platform_ strategy. I'm sure there are clues in the IDF
presentations. I just haven't had a chance to look.

Where's the excitement coming from? Probably not from Intel/AMD, as
far as my eye can see.

RM

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 07:17:17 -0500, Robert Myers <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 05:34:54 -0500, George Macdonald
><fammacd=!SPAM^(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>
><snip>
>
>>
>>Christ it's IDF week Robert - plenty of bull excrement to go around.
>>Amusing to watch Goldman Sachs grovel and lick the boots at the feet of
>>their favorite hero though.
>
>What's good for Intel is good for the country, you know, George. ;-).

But good for AMD would be just as good... or even better.;-)

>Some part of me wondered whether AMD could break into Dell. All other
>considerations aside, it's not like Dell to add unnecessary
>complication to its life. I'm sure they looked at how many sales they
>might lose vs. the engineering costs and decided it wasn't worth it.
>However that calculation came out, I'm sure they used it to squeeze
>Intel a little harder.

Engineering?... Dell? Hell, they don't even have a Serverworks chipset to
diddle with any longer - it's just Intel generic boxen top to bottom. I
think we all knew -- it was discussed here at length -- that Dell was just
using AMD as a manouvering device to "squeeze" Intel.

>The fact that Dell holds the line makes life much tougher for AMD, and
>if Opteron with Intel scrambling in the dust didn't do it, I don't
>know what would.

IMO Dell is going to get slaughtered in the server space anyway... unless
we have the unlikely situation that IBM decides to OEM Hurricane. Like
every other business, Dell will go through a bad spell and its precarious
business model could mean it will not weather the storm. Lack of depth
eventually tells... and then we'll get a new pretender.:-)

>>Hey I thought we were supposed to get an
>>official name for "Desktrino" this week. Did I miss it in all the
>>excitement?:-)
>
>I'm more interested in where Intel is headed with interconnect.
>Mellanox is now selling 10Gb/s infiniband adapters for $69 in
>quantity:
>
>http://www.mellanox.com/news/press/pr_030105.html

That works through a PCI Express interconnect. Pathscale has a direct
connect to Hypertransport 4x inifiniband adapter
http://www.pathscale.com/infinipath.html - dunno what "commodity priced"
means... nor what the size of that market might turn out to be.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 17:54:56 -0500, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 07:17:17 -0500, Robert Myers <(E-Mail Removed)>
>wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 05:34:54 -0500, George Macdonald
>><fammacd=!SPAM^(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>

<snip>

>
>>Some part of me wondered whether AMD could break into Dell. All other
>>considerations aside, it's not like Dell to add unnecessary
>>complication to its life. I'm sure they looked at how many sales they
>>might lose vs. the engineering costs and decided it wasn't worth it.
>>However that calculation came out, I'm sure they used it to squeeze
>>Intel a little harder.
>
>Engineering?... Dell? Hell, they don't even have a Serverworks chipset to
>diddle with any longer - it's just Intel generic boxen top to bottom. I
>think we all knew -- it was discussed here at length -- that Dell was just
>using AMD as a manouvering device to "squeeze" Intel.
>
I've lost track of Intel server chipsets. Is _anybody_ but Intel
making Server chipsets for Intel processors?

>>The fact that Dell holds the line makes life much tougher for AMD, and
>>if Opteron with Intel scrambling in the dust didn't do it, I don't
>>know what would.
>
>IMO Dell is going to get slaughtered in the server space anyway... unless
>we have the unlikely situation that IBM decides to OEM Hurricane. Like
>every other business, Dell will go through a bad spell and its precarious
>business model could mean it will not weather the storm. Lack of depth
>eventually tells... and then we'll get a new pretender.:-)
>
You think you can see that far into the future? Nothing would please
me more than to see Dell out of the dominant position. But they have
got it all worked out so smoothly.

The rules are all about to change with multicore chips. With
bandwidth requirements going through the roof, I think the day of the
motherboard is about to be at hand. How are they going to route all
that stuff, anyway? That sounds like a bad scene for Dell, except
that motherboards of requisite quality will be commodities.

AMD will make somebody else successful? Who? Just like the auto
business, the computer business is a business of vanishing margins,
and Dell is tops at that game.

How is Dell going to get slaughtered?

>>>Hey I thought we were supposed to get an
>>>official name for "Desktrino" this week. Did I miss it in all the
>>>excitement?:-)
>>
>>I'm more interested in where Intel is headed with interconnect.
>>Mellanox is now selling 10Gb/s infiniband adapters for $69 in
>>quantity:
>>
>>http://www.mellanox.com/news/press/pr_030105.html
>
>That works through a PCI Express interconnect. Pathscale has a direct
>connect to Hypertransport 4x inifiniband adapter
>http://www.pathscale.com/infinipath.html - dunno what "commodity priced"
>means... nor what the size of that market might turn out to be.

That's good to know about. That's a space in which AMD has a fighting
chance.

RM