News We’re not scared of Nehalem, says AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/04/01/amd-not-scared-of-nehalem/1

AMD claims that business isn't run on benchmarks, and describes Intel's Nehalem architecture as "the sincerest form of flattery".

 

That's like saying that a Porsche is a copy of the T-Ford because it has four wheels, a transmission, an engine, a seat, a wheel..

Yeah, they used the same ideas you did. It's not like you didn't step in someone else's footsteps when you created a NUMA architecture and added a memory controller to the CPU. What matters is whose product performs better.. And right now, you guys aren't even close.

If anyone wants to call me a fanboy, let me count the number of Intel machines I have.. Oh, that's 1. I have 6 AMD machines. From that time when it was the other way 'round.

 

Although they are as conceited as always in saying it, AMD is right. They will lose little sales as most businesses in these times can't afford that premium. The true winner has the best mid range.

 

QFT

 

While it's obvious for this kind of statement to come from AMD, it's basically right. Most (and I mean 85-90%) of sales are low-to-mid-end parts so the new Xeons are more of a marketing gimmick than a real deal, especially given the fact that for the price of one of them you can have three fastest Opterons which will overall be faster and give you more physical cores to do your job, and for the price difference between DDR2 and DDR3 you can buy a fourth one. Businessmen are not fanboys, they go where the cost/performance ratio is better and Intel's traditionally stupid and completely unjustified pricing policy makes the new xeons nice to look at, but not a viable market option.

 

What about platform costs? AFAIK, moving from any other system to Nehalem EP implies in a whole system overhaul. Is that the case with most modern Opterons?

 

wasnt it AMD to make their opterons have something similar to QPI in the first place? If so, I think thats what they are talking about when they say their arent scared of nehalem EP's. AMD should have made the phenom II's with AMD's version of QPI and their equivalent of SMT then sell that @ $140USD. imagine that competing with core i7's for half the price. then intel would be saying they arent afraid of AMD.

 

When we needed a couple of new servers at work we went for the cheapest option, in this case that was Opterons instead of Xeons by about £150 per server.
Then I found it was going to cost us £6000 for a copy of SQL2005 and that £300 saving didn't look very important

 

Still you saved £300 even if you did have to spend a further £6K.

AMD is right, its the best mid to low range cost of server parts. I think AMD will bounce back with something interesting in the near future after all each side keeps winning battles but neither have won the war yet.

AMD just need to get there toe into the netbook market.

 

Proprietary? Why?

http://www.sun.com/software/products/mysql/getit.jsp

 

Business rhetoric. Gotta love it!

 

I'm sure your accounting department was happy you spent an extra $300.

 

I lol'd at the comment about there being no 4socket nehalems.

After reading all those benchmarks and real-life simulations, who the hell needs a 4-way nehalem with 32 "virtual" cores?

They are achieving double the performance AMD offers with just 2 processors anyway