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Your thinking is too narrow. Let’s take simple examples Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers toget

Your thinking is too narrow. Let’s take simple examples Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them. You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor. Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution. Does your management stack supports DASH? Are your IT peeps familiar with it? Doesn’t have sufficient traction and market adoption? Likely not and that is again because AMD slept for half a decade. Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs? Heck even if you aren’t going to grow what about dealing with disasters? Do you really want to compound an already huge risk with another one? And about what you said about Zen. Zen isn’t that different to bulldozer in many aspects I suggest you should read the intrinsics guides for both. And even if it was 100% different it doesn’t matter a 5 year gap kills the entire infrastructure of partners and provide tools and education. If I need to optimize software today for an Intel CPU I have a plethora of resources, AMD can’t even release their instructions latency tables for 17h.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them. > You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor. The premise is that you're migrating from one vendor to the other, so once you move something to the other pool it shouldn't have to move back. Having to reboot each guest once is inconvenient, but aren't you already doing this every month or two for security updates? > Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution. This absolutely is AMD's fault, but the real issue is that their remote management solution (like Intel's) is a closed source black box. If they would open it up then it might be adopted by ARM vendors and so on and no one would have to worry about being abandoned because the community could continue to support it for as long as enough people want to keep using it. And it would put pressure on Intel to do the same thing, at which point they could be consolidated. > Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs? That would be the case if we were talking about some low volume product at risk of becoming unavailable. You can still source Opteron systems even today if you really want them. But nobody has wanted them for five years because the migration cost isn't that high.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Migrating VMs between vendors isn’t a reboot and you are done. And as far as sourcing Opterons are you serious? Sure you can source them on eBay but take a look at when the likes of HP stopped supplying them.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them. > You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor. The premise is that you're migrating from one vendor to the other, so once you move something to the other pool it shouldn't have to move back. Having to reboot each guest once is inconvenient, but aren't you already doing this every month or two for security updates? > Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution. This absolutely is AMD's fault, but the real issue is that their remote management solution (like Intel's) is a closed source black box. If they would open it up then it might be adopted by ARM vendors and so on and no one would have to worry about being abandoned because the community could continue to support it for as long as enough people want to keep using it. And it would put pressure on Intel to do the same thing, at which point they could be consolidated. > Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs? That would be the case if we were talking about some low volume product at risk of becoming unavailable. You can still source Opteron systems even today if you really want them. But nobody has wanted them for five years because the migration cost isn't that high.

dogma1138 9y ago
Migrating VMs between vendors isn’t a reboot and you are done. And as far as sourcing Opterons are you serious? Sure you can source them on eBay but take a look at when the likes of HP stopped supplying them.