Opteron Goes Dual-Core, But Dell Still Isn't Buying

IDG News Service - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. last week again beat Intel Corp. to market with cutting-edge technology, announcing two series of Opteron CPUs with a pair of processing cores on a single chip. But while Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. said they plan to use the dual-core devices in servers, Dell Inc. remains an Opteron holdout.

During a meeting with financial analysts in Austin earlier this month, Dell executives reiterated that the company plans to remain an Intel-only vendor, at least for now.

Dell flirted with AMD last year, as Intel foundered with manufacturing missteps and product road map detours. But Intel has stabilized its chip development plans since last November, according to analysts, and Dell has eased back on its AMD-friendly rhetoric.

Jeff Clarke, senior vice president in charge of Dell's enterprise products, said in an interview with Computerworld in February that the company was standing by Intel on processors . At the analyst meeting this month, Clarke noted that Dell had seen only "marginal increases" in demand for AMD's chips from customers.

University of Buffalo professor Russ Miller, who runs the school's Center for Computing Research, cited problems with the bus architecture design for Intel's upcoming dual-core Xeon processors as one reason why Opteron is an alluring option for high-performance computing users as well as some business customers. The Intel chips will share a bus connection to the memory in servers, which could affect performance on applications that require fast shuffling of data to and from memory.

Miller said that in conversations with Chairman Michael Dell and other Dell executives, he has expressed his satisfaction with the company's engineering and sales teams. But he also told them of his desire for an Opteron-based server from Dell. "We don't see an option from Dell," Miller said. "But we know this is important to our industry."

Intel isn't expected to release its dual-core Xeon processor until early 2006. However, Dell executives noted that adopting AMD as a supplier would increase the computer maker's operating costs because it would need to set up new development and testing teams. Using Opteron also could affect the pricing deals that Dell gets from Intel in return for its fidelity.

"If Dell were to offer [Opteron systems], that'd be great," said Chris Ruffieux, vice president of technology at Gannett Media Technologies International in Norfolk, Va. "But if it's going to cause the prices of other things I'm buying from Dell to go up, I'd rather have it stay the same."

Dell and Alienware Corp. last week began shipping PCs with Intel's first dual-core processor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The fact that both AMD and Intel launched their initial dual-core products in the same week "is pretty amusing," said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report in San Jose. "They're fighting tooth and nail."