AMD: Our best competitive server position in years If you were thinking that Advanced Micro Devices was going to report killer server processor sales in its first quarter 2010 financial results, you were bound to be disappointed. The company is in the middle of two product transitions and is lagging behind its rival by several weeks and a certain amount of OEM enthusiasm. But …
Well there's certainly something odd going on if HP can't be persuaded to announce a Proliant with a Nehalem EX in it at the Nehalem EX launch PR-fest. Not the kind of partner relationship that Intel would be looking for. Maybe HP want a bit more of a discount on those IA64 things, and they think staying with AMD and ignoring Nehalem EX is a way to get there? Who knows...
The graphics cards were pretty lousy in the 2000/3000 years right around the takeover, but ever since the 4000 line came out two years ago, they've held the performance and efficiency crown. (Nvidia may finally be preparing to retake it with their new generation.) Even the Opteron's been gaining a lot more steam over the past year+ compared the doldrums it was stuck in after Woodcrest (Xeon 5100). I guess you don't pay attention to component news much.
Nah you're getting carried away. They didn't take the game performance crown from Nvidia until about a year ago. As for GPGPU they still suck bad for science apps (get about half performance of Nvidia and OpenCL still sucks compared to CUDA). Yes I know most folks don't care but main reason I buy video cards. I would rail even harder on their always flaky drivers if Nvidia newest cards weren't also so full of fail (only %10 faster than six month old 5870, $100 more, 480W, 97 deg C on outside of card, xbox 360 loud fan, etc). The 6000 series may well bury Nvidia if they don't get their Fermi shit together this year. As for AMD again keep dreaming. AMD has once again went back to being the price/performance king always a generation back. Now that Intel has started folding enterprise Intium features into the Xeons and with Quckpath I don't see AMD ever having enough cash to leap frog Intel again. They had their one chance and Hector Ruiz screwed the pooch.
Put Hector up near the top with Carly.
It'll be nice to get some decent opterons out; Barcelona and Istanbul were terrible disappointments. And those Supermicro boards do look nice...
Beat the pants off of the ASUS boards I've been using for the past while. (Never. Again. You hear me Asus? NEVER. AGAIN. *hiss*)
Yes ASUS has really when to sh_t the past few years. They used to be the last word in mother boards. Now you are lucky to get a board from them that lasts more than a year. I bet its another case where they got greedy moved everything over to main land China to reduce costs and now the hens are coming home to roost. China land of tainted milk, formaldehyde laced dry wall, and toys full of broken glass.
Here's a motherboard that takes your perfectly normal Socket F chip. Oh look, a new generation of socket F chip has come out! Let's rename the board with three extra letters and re-release it to support this chip.
Completely forget that every single other manufacturer in the entire industry provides this support WITH A BIOS UPDATE...this is ASUS. If you want that functionality it’ll be a new board, suh. Oh, and just for shits and giggles, we’re going to completely discontinue the board you were using to build out your server fleet right in the middle of your roll out and only sell the new board. So that board you were basing your servers off of, that you were really, really hoping would be on some sort of “Corporate Stable Model” program and last three years? Eight months. Now your options are abandon your server line, or have your set of servers with two nearly identical boards (with identical markings) but which are BIOS incompatible and don’t support the same processors. That’s absolutely *fantastic* for long term support of that equipment.
So yes. **** ASUS. **** then with a lacquered bus. They have started to do to components (like server boards) which should be in “corporate stable model” programs what they’ve done to notebooks: refresh them ever 8 months so it’s absolutely impossible to use their kit for business.
The part that really makes me angry is that I had spent ten years building a relationship with my local distributor. That distie is locked in, and can’t bring in Tyan or Supermicro boards for their servers for a few years yet. This means that because ASUS have degenerated from an excellent company that made quality boards *and supported the piss out of them* into shite that would make Acer circa 2001 blush I have to go find a new distie. Not an easy thing in Canada: our disties are pretty universally shite in one way or another.
That isn’t even getting into the spectacular rates of component failure I’ve been seeing from ASUS lately. (Actually, Kingston too. Seriously, Kingston, dudes...what? Pull it together.)
So yeah, I need to stop this ranting now. Otherwise this will turn into like 8000 pages of bitter nerd rage.
</venting>
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