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

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 22:57:56 +0800, Paul Repacholi
wrote:

"spinlock" writes:

vs 6000 Itaniums and 600 million in revenue?!?!?!

That is $100,000 per unit!

Where did you say that bridge was Nick...

They actually only sold $319M in revenue on a bit shy of 6,000 units.
the $600M figure was for the year to date, so actually their
per-server average is somewhere a bit over $50,000. MUCH higher than
the ~$3000 average per Opteron server, but not $100,000.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 20:56:08 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
Tony Hill 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.

Well, on the latter case they seemed to have done pretty well (though
AMD64 was definitely not the only reason for IA64's rather limited
success), but they aren't exactly taking a huge amount of market share
away from Xeon. There was something like 1.4M Xeon servers sold in Q2
vs. 60,000 Opteron servers. This gives the Opteron only about 4%
market share. I guess this is a lot better than 0%, though at it's
height the AthlonMP managed something like 5 or 6% of the global
server market, so the Opteron hasn't even reached that stage yet,
despite signing up some big OEMs.

I found this new article which gives the actual number of server chips sold:

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech...FREE&cm_ite=NA

http://tinyurl.com/3mfo4

In the second quarter of 2003, AMD shipped a mere 110,000 server chips
compared with Intel's 4.6 million shipments, according to Gartner. Since
then Opteron scored some major design wins, helping it nearly double
shipments to 205,000 as of the second quarter this year.

But it still lagged far behind Intel's 5.4 million shipments.

Err, uhh, Yousuf, either you're cut 'n paste is a little wonky or they
changed the article since you read it. Now it reads:

"In the second quarter of 2003, AMD shipped a mere $110 million in
server chips compared with Intel's $4.6 billion in shipments,
according to Gartner."


Note the dollar values instead of units shipped. Lat though they do
seem to be switching back to units shipped:

"Since then, Opteron scored some major design wins, helping it nearly
double shipments to 205,000 as of the second quarter this year.

But it still lagged far behind Intel's 5.4 million shipments."


Hmm... strange.

Now 205,000 chips into the 60,000 servers (previously stated) equates to
about on average 3.4 processors per server. Considering that the vast
majority of Opteron servers are usually either 2P or 4P, that makes complete
sense. And since the number is closer to 4P than to 2P, that would indicate
that more 4P Opteron servers got sold than 2P ones.

I'm not sure that this is accurate as it might also include some
AthlonMP chips where the 60,000 server number might just be for
Opterons.

Also the two numbers came from two different companies, so I wouldn't
be surprised if they are not measuring quite the same thing, it
certainly would not be the first time that Gartner and IDC came up
with conflicting reports.

So it would seem, that Opteron's multiprocessing capacities are being
exploited to their utmost. Once 8P Opterons come into more common usage, it
would be interesting to see if corporations are utilizing their capacity
will be utilized too?

I really doubt that the 3.4 processors/server number is accurate, it
seems just way too high considering that Sun only just recently
started selling 4P Opterons, IBM never sold them and many small OEMs
also stick to only 1 and 2P Opteron servers. I would be VERY
surprised if AMD is really selling more 4P Opteron servers than 2P
ones, it just doesn't fit the market dynamics at all.

Of course, part of the confusion might be related to dollar value vs.
unit shipment confusion mentioned above.

Wonder how many Xeon servers were sold that same quarter? That way we can do
the same math and find out what the average number of processors there are
in a Xeon.

Roughly 1.4M Xeon servers were sold in Q2 of 2004. I don't know the
exact number, but it was somewhere around 1.6M total servers and about
90% of them are x86.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:17:25 -0500, Ed wrote:
On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:11:25 -0500, Ed wrote:

Linux Server Shipments Grew 55 Percent in the Quarter
Wednesday, August 25 2004 @ 08:33 AM
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/articl...40825083301801

While Itanium still grew at strong rates, the industry saw the emergence
of the x86-64 CPU space, which had a year-over-year growth rate of 2,183
percent.

2,183%, what?

There were hardly any x86-64 servers shipped in Q2 of 2003, so the
fact that 20 times as many servers shipped in Q2 of 2004 isn't all
that big of a surprise. They're just talking of growth from ~3,000
servers to ~60,000 servers.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

In article ,
Tony Hill wrote:

There were hardly any x86-64 servers shipped in Q2 of 2003, so the
fact that 20 times as many servers shipped in Q2 of 2004 isn't all
that big of a surprise. They're just talking of growth from ~3,000
servers to ~60,000 servers.

That's the point. IA64 CPUs dribbled onto the market and, in the
first couple of quarters that they were sold widely, pretty well
all sales were of workstations and small servers for development
and testing. The Opteron is less radical, so should ramp faster,
but the same is occurring.

The current figures are so confused as to tell us no more than the
Opteron is at least being a qualified success, and the Itanium has
neither crashed and burned nor taken off. No more than that.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Nick Maclaren wrote:

That's the point. IA64 CPUs dribbled onto the market and, in the
first couple of quarters that they were sold widely, pretty well
all sales were of workstations and small servers for development
and testing. The Opteron is less radical, so should ramp faster,
but the same is occurring.

The thing is : It's not just Opteron, it's Athlon64 too. Athlon64
is where the volume will be (if anywhere), perhaps we're looking
in the wrong place ?

Cheers,
Rupert

Tony Hill wrote:
I found this new article which gives the actual number of server
chips sold:


http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech...FREE&cm_ite=NA

http://tinyurl.com/3mfo4

In the second quarter of 2003, AMD shipped a mere 110,000 server
chips compared with Intel's 4.6 million shipments, according to
Gartner. Since then Opteron scored some major design wins, helping
it nearly double shipments to 205,000 as of the second quarter this
year.

But it still lagged far behind Intel's 5.4 million shipments.

Err, uhh, Yousuf, either you're cut 'n paste is a little wonky or they
changed the article since you read it. Now it reads:

"In the second quarter of 2003, AMD shipped a mere $110 million in
server chips compared with Intel's $4.6 billion in shipments,
according to Gartner."

Hmm, it looks like they re-edited the article since I originally read it. I
copy'n'pasted straight from the article up there. If they were talking about
dollars instead of units, then I wouldn't have even found it necessary to
quote it at all. It's a good thing I decided to quote excerpts from it,
otherwise people wouldn't have known what I was talking about.

Note the dollar values instead of units shipped. Lat though they do
seem to be switching back to units shipped:

"Since then, Opteron scored some major design wins, helping it nearly
double shipments to 205,000 as of the second quarter this year.

But it still lagged far behind Intel's 5.4 million shipments."


Hmm... strange.

Looks like there might still be some re-editing of the article left to do.
:-)

Now 205,000 chips into the 60,000 servers (previously stated)
equates to about on average 3.4 processors per server. Considering
that the vast majority of Opteron servers are usually either 2P or
4P, that makes complete sense. And since the number is closer to 4P
than to 2P, that would indicate that more 4P Opteron servers got
sold than 2P ones.

I'm not sure that this is accurate as it might also include some
AthlonMP chips where the 60,000 server number might just be for
Opterons.

I think that was simply 60,000 Opterons, from the Register article that I
originally posted to start off this thread. I doubt there's much AthlonMP
sales left.

In fact, I think people with AthlonMP mobos are probably going to need to
replace their Athlon MPs with Socket A Semprons from now on.

So it would seem, that Opteron's multiprocessing capacities are being
exploited to their utmost. Once 8P Opterons come into more common
usage, it would be interesting to see if corporations are utilizing
their capacity will be utilized too?

I really doubt that the 3.4 processors/server number is accurate, it
seems just way too high considering that Sun only just recently
started selling 4P Opterons, IBM never sold them and many small OEMs
also stick to only 1 and 2P Opteron servers. I would be VERY
surprised if AMD is really selling more 4P Opteron servers than 2P
ones, it just doesn't fit the market dynamics at all.

Well, they did say that the white boxers overwhelmingly outnumber the OEMs
in Opteron sales. Some of those whiteboxers include such brands as Verrari
Systems (formerly Racksaver), and others, which do have a large server brand
presense. So it may not have mattered if IBM, Sun or HP had their 4-way
boxes in place yet.

Of course, part of the confusion might be related to dollar value vs.
unit shipment confusion mentioned above.

We'll await the final re-edit. :-)

Wonder how many Xeon servers were sold that same quarter? That way
we can do the same math and find out what the average number of
processors there are in a Xeon.

Roughly 1.4M Xeon servers were sold in Q2 of 2004. I don't know the
exact number, but it was somewhere around 1.6M total servers and about
90% of them are x86.

Well at that number, if 5.4 million Xeon chips were sold into 1.4 million
servers then that would come out to 3.8 chips/server average. So it would
mean 4-way Xeons outnumber 2-way Xeons, which doesn't make too much sense I
guess.

Yousuf Khan

In comp.arch Yousuf Khan wrote:
Grumble wrote:
What do you mean by proprietary versus open?

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

As a matter of fact, yes.

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

Will let them use Hypertransport too.

Hypertransport licence is rather cheap i thought? On the order of
something that even a quite small company (10+ people) could afford?


Yousuf Khan


--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Sander Vesik wrote:
Would AMD let VIA or Transmeta implement AMD64 in their CPUs?

As a matter of fact, yes.

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

Will let them use Hypertransport too.

Hypertransport licence is rather cheap i thought? On the order of
something that even a quite small company (10+ people) could afford?

Yep, it is -- as a matter of fact. :-)

Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
gers.com...
***Big News*** Intel's Itanium chips have hit the $14 billion in revenue
mark!! However there was a small one-time over-optimism charge of $13.4bn.
BUT THIS STUFF IS INCREDIBLE, IT'S EXACTLY AS IDC HAD PREDICTED ALL
ALONG!!
That's an amazing 5,665 server units, this past quarter!!!

PS- Oh, and btw, if you're interested (and frankly, I can't see why anyone
would be), Opterons sold 60,000 server units, or something or another,
blah-blah-blah.

One of the interesting things about numbers is that people can get
completely lost in them. For example, the numbers published by The
Register show that Opteron systems sold for an average of ~$3000 each,
while the Itanium systems sold for a mere ~$53,000 each. IOW, one Itanium
system is not necessarily equivalent (in either revenue, number of
processors, or market segment) to one Opteron system.

FWIW, there are only about 11,000 z/Series systems (or equivalent) in the
world, yet they run essentially all of the mission critical apps of Fortune
1000 companies. Number of systems sold is not an indication of
failure/success, nor of importance in a market. There are much more
important metrics one might want to focus on to paint a true picture of the
value of a product.

Regards,
Dean


Now back to Itanium! HULK SMASH! HULK SMASH! Yeah!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08...nium_sales_q2/

Yousuf Khan

--
Humans: contact me at ykhan at rogers dot com
Spambots: just reply to this email address ;-)

In article ,
Dean Kent wrote:

One of the interesting things about numbers is that people can get
completely lost in them. For example, the numbers published by The
Register show that Opteron systems sold for an average of ~$3000 each,
while the Itanium systems sold for a mere ~$53,000 each. IOW, one Itanium
system is not necessarily equivalent (in either revenue, number of
processors, or market segment) to one Opteron system.

If I recall, the first figure published for the average selling
price of Itanium systems was c. $15,000 - which was the price of
a high-end workstation. The initial buyers bought - surprise,
surprise - workstations for testing and development.

What will be interesting is to see how the average price of the
Opteron systems changes. If it goes up significantly, we have
evidence of more sales in the server and MPP/cluster market; if
it doesn't, then it is stuck in the workstation market.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.