Mike calling Henri
Mike: Henri, you happy now? We announced Opteron support, and your stock shot up $15.
Henri: Well, you are not doing so bad either, yours went up 15%.
Mike: Yes, it was a win-win situation. But, I am calling you for some help.
Henri: Really? Anything I can do, name it.
Mike: You see, we got these big customers, tens of thousands of four way Opteron servers, a lot of money...
Henri: Good for you, congratulations.
Mike: But the customers want them soon, and we don't have enough Opteron parts.
Henri: Let me check your allocation... Sorry, Mike, our supply is kind of tight...
Mike: Henri, you got to help me this time, we are losing a lot of Xeon sales, these customers are very important...
Henri: Have you heard of our Turion 64 X2 chip? It 's 64 bit and dual core, much much better than Core Duo. That IA32 bit chip has the shelf life of a banana. Why don't you try Turion X2 out and ship a product or two with that?
Mike: If I do, you will get me the Opterons?
Henri: I will try my best, Mike. We are partners now, right? I think Turion will be good for you, as people will be wondering why you are doing the highest end servers with Opteron but not PCes derived from it.
Mike: I see. I will phone ASUS CEO now, he has Turion X2 notebook designs. I will send him 5 million DELL stickers right now...
Henri: Good. Give me a ring when you are done.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 5/18/2006 01:10:00 PM
11 Comments:
What about Paul's sos calls ??
Ya, will he receive a call from Paul during midnight?
Yes, Paul will be absolutely apoplectic - I can't wait to see Paul's call.
Mike: I see. I will phone ASUS CEO now, he has Turion X2 notebook designs. I will send him 5 million DELL stickers right now...
Absolutely! That is exactly how easy it will be for Dell to move to fully dump Intel.
In a few weeks, you will be able to get Turion 64 X2 notebooks from HP.
I don't see why Dell would not want to be there too, offering the first 64-bit dual-core notebooks.
Meanwhile Apple is dumping oodles of 32-bit Intel chips on their unsavvy tech-dupe customer base. Who else besides Apple could pump and dump $3000 obsolete 32-bit MacBook Pros when a new model is coming out in mere months with new 64-bit chips?
Uh... Could anyone please tell me why 64-bit is important in the NOTEBOOK segment at the moment?
More than 4GB in notebooks? How many Turion X2 owners will have that? How many Turion X2 motherboards will support more than 4GB?
Windows Vista? There will be a 32-bit version of Vista, and unless you put 16GB address space applications on Vista, you won't notice the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit. And, again, NOTEBOOKS.
Performance? Well, the "32-bit" "old" "primitive" Core Duos outperform the "modern" "64-bit" Turion X2s at the moment.
So, why get Turions???
I think Apple Macbooks will offer better performance than any Turion X2 systems until >4GB 64-bit-exclusive applications come out.
And when that happens, you think even the Turions will help you???
"Could anyone please tell me why 64-bit is important in the NOTEBOOK segment at the moment?"
Somewhere else alrady had this discussion. Here's my count:
(1)Larger memory requirement is coming, according to "Moore's law."
(2)I imagine with a large address space, one could store the whole working OS image and "instant-on" the computer.
(3)Virtualization would benefit from a large flat address space.
(4)Plus, X86-64 is just more elegant than IA-32. It's called Evolution (fortunately toward the better in this case). :-)
Hey Shark!
Let me start off by saying that your blog has recently become one of my favorite daily tech reads. Very informative and entertaining as well. This "phone call" series is hilarious! The "pump & dump" read is also good, as well as the rest of your content. Keep up the good work!!!
Ed
I get your points, edward. I know about the "coming" large memory requirements. My question is, in the NOTEBOOK arena...
How many Turion X2 notebooks will support a large physical memory address space as you put it? Ever?
Do you know of any Turion X2 motherboards that can support more than 2-3GB of memory?
Even in the virtual space, why? How many applications in the NOTEBOOK segment as of now need more than 4GB address space?
I know the arguments for 64-bit in the server/workstation segments, and I agree with them. But not in the case of notebooks. I don't see the use of beyond 4GB of memory in notebooks for at least a year.
Yonah+OS 32-bit: 8 GPR 32-bit, 8 XMM 128-bit
T64/X2+OS 64-bit: 16 GPR 64-bit, 16 XMM 128-bit
Advantages of 64-bit notebooks:
- You can develop 64-bit software on it (and then run it on servers)
- Many 64-bit programs are slightly faster (10-30%), thanks to the increased number of registers.
- You can run 64-bit linux on it, where almost all programs are compiled with a 64-bit compiler.
- There's now a 64-bit Java Virtual Machine and .NET 2.0, they might be faster, thanks to the increased number of registers; Java and .NET programs may take advantage of that.
- Even Windows XP x64 is not that bad... :)
Even for the mundane every day jobs we have to do on a computer, x64 allows you to use Windows x64 which runs programs more smoothly than Windows x32. Hence at the very least, x64 makes each computing day a bit nicer.
The arguments against x64 are all the same things we heard against x32 when x16 was the main thing. The people who use computers but don't understand them will always speak out of fear. They spent a lot of money on x32 and they don't want to have to spend money on x64. So they attack x64 as being useless. It's all so dumb, but all so human.
For example, in their heart of hearts, all the cultists that bought obsolete MacBook and MacBook Pro know they were foolish. That they are being used by their cult. But they can't admit it, but they would lose stature in their cult. But it doesn't stop the pain they feel inside.
AMD has done the right thing by people and not shipped a bunch of cripple chips that cannot lift 64 bits at once. So if you want to invest a small amount of money and get Windows x64, you can.
And folks, you just gotta be honest about it. If Intel could ship 64-bit, they would. Because Intel has zero talent, including the cut-and-paste Isrealis, the company cannot even make x64. Never mind all the other stuff Intel is saying they are going to do. It's mostly marketing from the new golden boy at Intel, Shiny Kim.
At the end of the day, Mikie Dell doesn't care about Intel. Maybe Mikie will get a few dirty looks at Temple for giving Andy's company the shaft. But mostly, Mikie will get a lot of praise from all the people running their smut companies on those new Dell Opteron servers.
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