On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 06:55:18 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>"George Macdonald" <fammacd=!SPAM^(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> What's funny/interesting about that report is the reaction of the usual
>AMD
>> bashers/Intel cheerleaders, i.e. IDC & Gartner - they sound just a wee bit
>> grudging in their acknowledgement that it could be the way to go.
>
>I was sort of thinking to myself that it's been kinda cold here this winter,
>maybe hell hath frozen over?
>
>> We'll see if this is another example of the "genius" of Michael Dell.:-)
>
>I can understand why the Opteron is seeming so attractive to these tier-1
>OEMs. It's not the attraction of awesome SPEC numbers, or the drawing power
>of amazing TPM-C numbers; I think they're being drawn in like flies because
>of Opteron's pre-existing infrastructure. You can buy barebones Newisys 1-,
>2-, and 4-way servers right off the shelf and badge it with your own names.
>If you don't want to go with Newisys, then all you have to do is buy a
>motherboard off-the-shelf from Tyan or MSI or someone else, that can support
>upto 4-way too.
AMD has also contracted out Celestica to do some 2 and 4 way servers.
To date, almost all of the 4P Opteron serves I've seen have used the
Celestica design. Tyan also seems like they're getting into the
server design-and-resell thing with the Opteron. Certainly makes
things easy for the little guys, though I don't know that it's as big
of a benefit to the Tier-1 OEMs as you suggest. IBM and HP certainly
have enough resources to design their own Opteron servers if they so
chose, it just comes down to a question of whether the cost to do so
would outweigh the extra cost to pay someone else to do the design
when split across the total number of servers they expect to sell.
>In fact, I heard that's exactly what IBM did too, it bought a 2-way mobo
>from MSI, and then stuffed it in one of their standard 2U cases, and voila
>an eServer 325. Sun may be going with Newisys servers, so their only R&D
>outlay would be to engineer a psychadelic purple Sun Fire faceplate for it.
>HP might go ahead and do the same thing as Sun.
From what I could see, Sun didn't even redesign the faceplate, just
put some purple stickers on it :>
As for IBM, just have a look at MSI's website. Take a look at the
K1-1000 dual-processor 1U Opteron server and than look at IBM's e325.
I think you'll notice some distinct similarities!
>This seems like AMD is doing for these OEMs, that which Intel normally does
>only for Dell. That is, it is pre-engineering the whole server for them, so
>that they have very little outlay of their own. If more and more OEMs start
>jumping on this cookie-cutter bandwagon, then obviously some customers are
>going to start to notice that they are getting the exact same server from
>all of these disparate OEMs, so at that point the OEMs may be forced to do
>some of their own engineering to differentiate themselves from each other.
Well, I'm not sure who's doing all the designing and who's just doing
the selling, but it certainly seems to be the way that things are
going. It's not just AMD and Opteron servers though, IBM's e335 looks
like a near-exact copy of the IBM e325/MSI K1-1000 server except using
a pair of Xeon processors instead of a pair of Opterons. A few tweaks
in the processor and memory placement on the motherboard, but
otherwise they're the same server. I also wouldn't be at all
surprised if you could find some servers identical to those that Dell
being sold by other vendors. Different bezel and some different
stickers, but the same on the inside.
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca
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