Itanium sales hit $14bn (w/ -$13.4bn adjustment)! Uh, Opteron sales too

Tony Hill wrote :

Hmm.. to be fair to Intel though, their 5,665 server units
generated nearly twice as much revenue as the 60,000 Opteron
units.

No surprise here, they are counting whole server system prices, not
just the processors, Now check motherboard prices

On a per-unit basis, each Itanium server is selling for
more than 17 times as much as your average Opteron server
(~$56,000 vs. ~$3,100).

And how is the performance difference ? whoops ?

This is in direct
contrast to Opteron sales where the top 4 vendors managed only
23.5% of all sales by volume and 25.7% by revenue. In other
words, Opteron is definitely a "commodity" server chip while
Itanium is definitely not.

...in the world, where commodity is a key to succes.

Interesting numbers, been a while since we've seen them. While
Itanium sales do continue to grow, they aren't all that
impressive. It seems like after taking into account seasonal
variability that Itanium sales have been flat since Q4 of last
year.

How much exactly R&D for Itanium was ? I remember something arround
$1B.

Pozdrawiam.
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Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
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"Yousuf Khan" wrote :

And who the hell are NEC's customers that they command such huge avg
sales prices?

well, what did you expected from a company making fastest supecomputers
on Earth ?

Pozdrawiam.
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http://randki.o2.pl/profil.php?id_r=352019
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

In article ,
Tony Hill writes:
|
| It's probably not such a big issue for Dell here, though I'd imagine
| that HP was hoping for a few more high-end sales. This tends to
| suggest that their big Superdome servers just aren't selling well at
| all. $52,000 is about the going rate for a fairly low-end 4P Itanium
| server or a well loaded 2P server.

It's better than it was for HP a year ago, or when I saw the last
such breakdown! But, yes, I agree with your analysis.

SGI has slipped on the average price, which probably indicates that
its smaller customers are now prepared to accept Altix systems, as
well as it has had fewer very large sales.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Stephen Sprunk wrote:

That was the entire point of Opteron -- bringing 64-bit computing to the
commodity market. Oh, and taking market share away from Xeon, and
showing IT managers what a stupid idea it is to lock themselves into
proprietary IA64 when they can run open AMD64 systems.

What do you mean by proprietary versus open?

Would AMD let VIA or Transmeta implement AMD64 in their CPUs?

For a fee or gratis?

I suppose Intel would refuse to let another company produce
IA-64 compatible chips?

--
Regards, Grumble

Grumble wrote:
Stephen Sprunk wrote:

That was the entire point of Opteron -- bringing 64-bit computing to
the commodity market. Oh, and taking market share away from Xeon, and
showing IT managers what a stupid idea it is to lock themselves into
proprietary IA64 when they can run open AMD64 systems.


What do you mean by proprietary versus open?

Would AMD let VIA or Transmeta implement AMD64 in their CPUs?

For a fee or gratis?

I suppose Intel would refuse to let another company produce
IA-64 compatible chips?

Transmeta has indeed licensed AMD64 from AMD, i don't know about Via.
Intel obviously is making AMD64 compatible chips also.

I don't think Intel alone has the authority to let someone make a IA-64
compatible chip, apparently the patents are tied up in a company owned
by both Intel and HP.

Superfunk wrote:

Grumble wrote:

Stephen Sprunk wrote:

That was the entire point of Opteron -- bringing 64-bit computing to
the commodity market. Oh, and taking market share away from Xeon,
and showing IT managers what a stupid idea it is to lock themselves
into proprietary IA64 when they can run open AMD64 systems.

What do you mean by proprietary versus open?

Would AMD let VIA or Transmeta implement AMD64 in their CPUs?

For a fee or gratis?

I suppose Intel would refuse to let another company produce
IA-64 compatible chips?

Transmeta has indeed licensed AMD64 from AMD, i don't know about Via.

Indeed. The press release is dated Saturday May 26, 2001.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/V...3~1181,00.html

Specifically, Transmeta has licensed AMD's x86-64 technology and
AMD's HyperTransport interconnect technology for their future x86
processors and technology initiatives.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chi...2087519,00.htm

Transmeta Chief Technology Officer David Ditzel said the
chipmaker will keep the 64-bit technology in its back pocket
for now. "We've licensed the extensions to use them when we
feel like it," Ditzel said.

Three years later, has Transmeta done anything with their AMD64 license,
aside from support for the NX bit?

Intel obviously is making AMD64 compatible chips also.

As far as I understand, Intel has a cross-licensing deal with AMD which
gave them access to AMD64. For free?

I don't think Intel alone has the authority to let someone make a IA-64
compatible chip, apparently the patents are tied up in a company owned
by both Intel and HP.

Doh! How could I forget HP?

Hmm.. to be fair to Intel though, their 5,665 server units
generated nearly twice as much revenue as the 60,000 Opteron
units.

No surprise here, they are counting whole server system prices, not
just the processors, Now check motherboard prices

Well even with that taken in account the number of processors on
itanium system is greater than on opteron.

Intel is pushing it no matter what, and AMD should hope intel won't
push it harder. If intel would just once release the Itanium for a new
procecess at same time as their x86 counter parts others would be in
deep trouble in server market...

On a per-unit basis, each Itanium server is selling for
more than 17 times as much as your average Opteron server
(~$56,000 vs. ~$3,100).

And how is the performance difference ? whoops ?

Well not 17 times as average, but typically the price goes up
exponentially, from smallest to biggest systems.
4 Processor topend opteron will costs, over 4times as much as two
processor top end opteron, without giving 2 as much realworld
performance while 2 the peak.
The same goes from 4-8 etc... Itanium sales are in bigger
configurations, like 16 or 128 processor systems, so price/performance
isn't such a deal, because they give the performance points opteron
won't have, even at price points that opteron system vendors can only
hope for.

Interesting numbers, been a while since we've seen them. While
Itanium sales do continue to grow, they aren't all that
impressive. It seems like after taking into account seasonal
variability that Itanium sales have been flat since Q4 of last
year.

How much exactly R&D for Itanium was ? I remember something arround
$1B.

Thats SPEND money, but there is difference between sustainable and
already spend money. For instance itanium can sustain its current R&D
based on sales for this year on intel...So who cares what was the R&D
costs that it had on previous years, intel invested its x86 revenues
to kill 3 RISC families and take the processor market from them and
succeeded, and probably withing few years can get the investment back
in extra revenues on itanium platform. Itanium doesn't have to sell
millions of peaces to succeed. Even half a million per year is quite
profitable venture. But if it succeeds greatly and intel could sell
million or couple million per year its still some extra revenue for
intel that would of gone for other ventures without itanium.
If you doubt the cost difference then. Let take their low end of
itanium line...
Sells at 513$ has half the cache and 3rd less of cache so only usefull
for software developement platform, still intel is having nice little
markup on them also. And the 1.5MB cache itanium really has 6MB of
cache just most of it disabled. [The disablement is not for fixing
defects its just that engineer salary compared to volume makes em more
profitable to simply disable extra cache than design new layout for
smaller cache, especially with high yield process on large wafers that
intel has.] So intel is selling 4000$ for high end itanium because
many customers are willing to pay for that for their multiprocessor
systems, and is exacly same chip as they can sell for 500$ with nice
profit margins on them too. Now if constantly people talk that alpha
team costed 100M$ to keep alive. And itanium has 3 teams on it plus
compiler guys. So thats well under 400M$ that itanium revenue should
be this year, and after that rest is profit. [Or repaying the
investment intel made on itanium.] So ASP with 2000$ and sales of 200k
per year its something you should keep its alive, BUT there is still
more itanium sales should grow little bit.
I personally hope that AMD can survive, and power too on the strenght
of intel since if they die processor prices go up, we all have
itaniums...
BTW: Itanium2 core is much smaller than P4 core but the cache's thats
is redundancy protected take most of the area. So itanium should be
about 2x as expensive to make than P4. And intel seems to make great
profits on P4 so it wouldn't be far fetched that itanium COULD be made
as a desktop processor with new software x86 emulation layer that
already is onpar xeon on integer and beats it on floatinpoint.

Jouni Osmala

Stephen Sprunk wrote:

That was the entire point of Opteron -- bringing 64-bit computing to
the commodity market. Oh, and taking market share away from Xeon, and
showing IT managers what a stupid idea it is to lock themselves into
proprietary IA64 when they can run open AMD64 systems.


What do you mean by proprietary versus open?

Would AMD let VIA or Transmeta implement AMD64 in their CPUs?

For a fee or gratis?

I suppose Intel would refuse to let another company produce
IA-64 compatible chips?

Transmeta has indeed licensed AMD64 from AMD, i don't know about Via.
Intel obviously is making AMD64 compatible chips also.

I don't think Intel alone has the authority to let someone make a IA-64
compatible chip, apparently the patents are tied up in a company owned
by both Intel and HP.

Purpose of that company is to keep IA-64 intellectual property for
BOTH Intel and HP and exclude others from the fact. So you would need
both of em to agree for letting anyone else make IA-64 processors. So
if either of them says you cannot do that.

Jouni Osmala

In article ,
Jouni Osmala wrote:
Stephen Sprunk wrote:


I don't think Intel alone has the authority to let someone make a IA-64
compatible chip, apparently the patents are tied up in a company owned
by both Intel and HP.

Purpose of that company is to keep IA-64 intellectual property for
BOTH Intel and HP and exclude others from the fact. So you would need
both of em to agree for letting anyone else make IA-64 processors. So
if either of them says you cannot do that.

Have you seen the contract that set up that company? That is a
reasonable guess, but it is equally possible that either party is
allowed to sublicence under certain conditions.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Never anonymous Bud wrote:
FALSE prophecies from the archives, "Yousuf Khan"
on Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:58:25 GMT spoke:

Yeah, gotta wonder about that. I thought the highest end Itaniums
were supposed to be those SGI's? What with all of that supercomputer
stuff they keep selling to NASA, etc. And who the hell are NEC's
customers that they command such huge avg sales prices?

I suspect there are lucrative service contracts included in those
prices.

But everybody has lucrative service contracts available for their machines.
Are you saying that NEC is the only one that includes it into their price?

Yousuf Khan