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I could be wrong but I assume that there's enough inertia in the high-end business-to-business side of things (the part that matters for high-end server process
by simias 9y ago
I could be wrong but I assume that there's enough inertia in the high-end business-to-business side of things (the part that matters for high-end server processors) that they probably can keep milking that cow for a few years more.
People who have only been buying Intel CPU in the last decade won't jump ship immediately. Nobody gets fired for buying Intel CPUs, at least until very recently. You know you won't have compatibility issues etc...
Of course within the next few years Intel will have to react somehow, either by outperforming AMD significantly to justify the premium or by slashing prices.
- gigatexal 9y agoI know I hope AMD can keep up the pressure and keep iterating.
- douglasfshearer 9y ago> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.
- tengbretson 9y agoAnd yet there are still people out there buying IBM and somehow not getting fired for it.
- abakker 9y agoDo you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?
- dijit 9y agoSystems Engineer here; Absolutely. Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc; The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run: A) Windows B) Full Disk Encryption TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.
- gigatexal 9y agoSo, um, ... what happened to those now "useless" servers. Wondering for a friend ;-)
- yourapostasy 9y agoAvailable software constraints choices in many of those cases. Put two choices in front of an application team exec: rewrite and port an application from POWER/AIX, POWER/System i, POWER/System z for $X million, with all the attending risks that entails. Or spend same $X million on new IBM hardware, and get more capacity, performance, etc., while the system administrators/system programmers update the underlying OS, with lower magnitude of risks and impacts, and if the sysadmins screw up, that's another department, not yours, anyways. Even if porting is a one-time charge, and saves Y * $X million in N years (where N usually <5). The choice to avoid risk is easy. This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered. If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.
- sigzero 9y agoPort away from? We moved everything TO POWER/AIX.
- filereaper 9y agoIf its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.
- gigatexal 9y agoPower is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.
- filereaper 9y agoI don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.
- rodgerd 9y agoSometimes IBM are better than the alternative. Hard to believe in the HN bubble, I know, but there you are. (The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)
- jsolson 9y agoI suspect anyone ordering top-bin CPU skus by the pallet-load has an ongoing program for evaluating performance-normalized TCO of at least a few candidate platforms based around a few candidate processors.
- gsnedders 9y agoHeck, why has Google been investing heavily in OpenPOWER? I bet it's as much as keeping the option there and making it as attractive as possible: gives them a far stronger negotiating position with Intel.