World's largest air force only wants Opteron
"Each of the system's 30 compute nodes must have two dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 8 gigabytes of RAM, DVD optical drive, at least 40 gigabytes of hard disk. The company selected must deliver the computer system 30 days after receiving the order."
Recall the benchmark in which 4 Opteron cores frag 8 Clovertown cores by a whopping 14.4%? People mostly use clusters for floating point, with less than 50% of K8's FP performance, Intel is pretty much out of the cluster market. As a server CPU company, AMD's chips are architected to be scalable and can handle heavy duty work loads under combat conditions. Intel's front side bus is just too fragile -- picture the scene in which 8 clovertown cores struggling to get on the bus-- and only one can succeed at any momentum of time--they frag each other in a ping-pong game fashion. At 4P, Opteron is 3x the speed of Intel.
You can't bid for this contract with unproven Woodcrest, and you can't do it with Solaris 10 either. Intel and Solaris are speced out here. The specs are Linux on Opteron. But, SUN's x4100 should be OK. SUN used to brag that their servers are classified as munitions, that must be 5 years ago. For today's complex environment, only Opteron is suitable...
It seems that the world's largest air force are no dummies.
The market is demaninding AMD. It was a fiasco, according to industry analysts.
AMD is not unhappy with the situation though. You saw cocky AMD execs bragging about their company in the recent analyst meeting. They were truly confident, they know they got it. The days for Intel are numbered.
"We opened up new fab, and we're converting old fab and doubled our capacity for test and packaging. And in all of that, it's still not keeping pace with what is becoming an incredible fourth quarter.... Demand for processors in the quarter is unbelievable."
As I predicted long ago, AMD should exit 2006 with 40% market share (run rate). Intel's BK by 2Q08 is pretty much in the bag. A few Intelers see Core 2 Duo having 10% lead on desktop, but 95% people don't buy the hype, and 75% of Intel's production are 32 bit or Netburst. That's hardly an enviable situation. You saw shortages for AMD processors, but you don't see shortages for Core 2 Duo. Why? There was little demand for that unproven chip-- despite the fact that Core 2 Duo supply is very tight. Intel only produced a few million Core 2 Duos.
You will see a bloody 4Q06 for Intel.
PS: found this, enjoy! It's all about perf0rmance per watt.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 1/04/2007 10:00:00 AM
31 Comments:
Nice to see that thease army guys do think and that they can see through marketing.
Now I would be delighted to be a AMD reseller :D
Only a fool would trust the security of the free world to unreliable Intel hardware.
From time and time again over years of use, AMD has showed the opteron to be a superiorly reliable hardware part of the US military. The US military rejected the conroe 6 months ago if you all remember. lol
Conroe is not fit to be used as a military P.O.J. Maybe in the home it works for people but in the battlefield there can be no room for failure. Proof of opterons reliable history unlike intels. Intel still only uses SI witch is crap compared to AMD's superior SOI tech they will go to SSOI very soon like IBM already has.
From time and time again over years of use, AMD has showed the opteron to be a superiorly reliable hardware part of the US military. The US military rejected the conroe 6 months ago if you all remember. Lol
You remember one thing in this reliability thing and that known bugs in a process. A big part of building a reliable system is knowing, that the calculations are done right. When introducing a new architecture it Is really hard to tell if there are some hidden bugs so even if Conroe was like 2x faster than opteron in ALL tasks (and I’m not saying that it is). I don’t believe that someone looking for total reliability would buy it before it could be tested for an extensive period of time.
Besides that opteron is great in server environments I run a website on a quad core (2 dual cores) opteron and it is handling the load just fine.
I laugh to thease intel commercials.
"computing the way it was meant to"
- Crashing your software after 5min lol :D
Is there a way to expose all these BS Intel commercials ?? Atleast the techies in the Air Force dont seem to buy them. Or perhaps ...the marketing guys at Intel should realise that there is only this much you can do..with ads meant for the well aware and informed techie...but their ads seem more and more meant for the CEO types....looks like an effort to please the Wall street crooks to show that they are trying hard to sell. For all the techies I personally know of ,Intel is a non existant name in the server space..
I wonder if AMD's >2P systems aren't good enough or are just too darn expensive that military prefers 2P render nodes. I thought 4P+ was the future, at least that's what our host keeps telling us.
Surely PhD pretender you must be joking!!
Nothing could be worse for AMD and Opetron reputation then being selected by the US goverement. THe US goverment has a long and illustrious history of buying underperforming hardware at over inflated prices...
What a joke. If the US goverment has endorsed AMD thats all anyone needs to know! Overpriced and underperforming...
What a sucker you are Sharikou
Only a fool would trust the security of the free world to unreliable Intel hardware.
Ooh, such clever FUD. I'm sure many important decision makers are reading this blog and you've probably swayed them with this subtle propoganda.
Jerkoff.
Nice attempt at the old "appeal to authority" technique. Unfortunately, nobody considers some random low-level air force procurement guy to be any kind of authority on anything, so it looks like it came up short.
Just goes to show that there are fanboi idiots in pretty much every field of expertise.
Anyone notice that the Benchmarks on AMD's site aren't even comparing their latest Opteron to Tulsa? Instead they compare them to the awful 90nm Paxville Xeon. Tulsa clocks higher and has a huge 16mb shared cache.
By reading the response from the Intel crowd something becomes obvious. They really are stupid as pointed out in an earlier post. The Woodcrest is a fine CPU and has a formidable place in modern computing, with that said, only a fool would post negatives about the Opteron’s only proven undeniable advantage over its speedy brethren.
Words mean things, you guys should take a break; you sound ridiculous. The Woodcrest is prefect for the lion share of America’s work load, be happy with that. Face the facts; Intel silicon is anemic and feeble for the big loads.
The moronic imbecile that made the remarks about the military hit the deck and give me 20 push-ups.
Why is the air force buying 'ultra low end 2P' systems Sharikou?
I thought 4P+ is where it's at.
It’s funny how the allusion of insignificant anecdotal samples is now the last refuge of AMDroids. It’s understandably hard with all the review sites praising Core2. What’s next? Do we blog about how granma bought her new single core Athlon based PC because she thinks it’s better than Celeron in performance?
I’m thinking this is another panic blog after the market downgraded AMD to a SELL after the inventory buildup and loss of market share to Intel.
We know, Intel BK in Q2’09, right?
I see that you are digging deeper and deeper to find positive news for your beloved company. Q4 results are coming I wonder how you will spin the results? I expect your topics will shift to the lawsuit for awhile.
Quote: "I thought 4P+ is where it's at."
Those 2P systems will be upgradeable to quad core when Barcelona ships!
Anonymous said...
"Why is the air force buying 'ultra low end 2P' systems Sharikou?
I thought 4P+ is where it's at."
If you actually read the comments concerning the article and the Air Force's requirements, it sounds like they are "minimum" requirements.
The cluster control node must have two dual-core AMD Opteron processors that run at least 2.8 GHz, 8 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM), DVD optical drive, at least 250 gigabytes of hard disk space, and open DIMM sockets to support future memory expansion.
Besides, if we want to get technical, a dual core 2P system is effectively 4P, i.e. 4 cores. Opteron has zero problems with bandwidth concerns at 2P, unlike Woodcrest even with the use of FB-DIMM.(that runs far hotter than DDR2 to boot) Reguardless, the fact that Opteron is preferred over Woodcrest or anything else Intel has to offer right now for thier mission critical server operations while Intel touts it's supposed performance advantage, speaks volumes.
I don't see this as as much of a win. Most likely Opteron was considered mature hardware and better than Intel's mature Presler hardware. Most likely Woodcrest and Tulsa were not considered as newer hardware. I think if Woodcrest had been considered it would have had similar performance.
AMD would be better at 4-way however this system only used 2 sockets per node. Tulsa appears to be much more competitive for 4-way than the older Xeon hardware. This is the best Intel can do until they have the quad FSB chipset for Clovertown.
WOW! AMD can now package twice as many processors! Now they only need to fix the problem that they cant build enough processors itself
Please define market share runrate mathematically before the #'s come out and you do an Enron on them. And using that mathematical equation please calculate AMD's Q3'06.
I sure hope you are not going to pawn off market share (runrate) as market share growth rate....
Oh and for AMD this is a huge win...when you are licking up the scraps off the floor any little bit helps. (30+ computer nodes! This is like 60+ chip sales! AMD is so money...better revise the old Q4'06 EPS estimates!)
"Besides, if we want to get technical, a dual core 2P system is effectively 4P, i.e. 4 cores."
And the "six beers short of a sixpack" award goes to...
Sharifraud... I don't have time to correct you point by point but the proof will be in the pudding. Intel's Q4 will beat expectations and AMD is going to have a worse than YoY performance for net income but better revenue.
I'll put my predictions up against yours any day of the week since my predictions don't have bias built into them.
Only a fool would name their daughter penix.
So doc what will the numbers for both Amd and Intel look like? WTF is runrate by the way? Can you give us a definition of this or some kind of formula that will quantify you 40% "runrate" number.
You are borderline delusional. I guess you haven't been reading any financial new lately, I don't blame you because it looks like Amd has been downgraded to a sell do to weak demand, inventory buildup, prices, etc..oh and they just took out another huge loan. On the technical front reverse hyperthreading was a myth, the 4X4 was disappointment a 65nm shrink was a big letdown. Looks like the only thing that Amd is going to beat Intel in is how fast they will BK. Maybe you should add them to your BK roadmap. Intel Q1 2008 Amd Q4 2007 or just admit that you were wrong about Intel going bankrupt and while your at how about the whole battery exploding thing, you could also say that you were wrong about that too. Man up dude.
Quote: "...it looks like Amd has been downgraded to a sell do to weak demand,..."
I bet these are the same people who advised people to BUY Enron!!!Wall Street is full of crooks, just like Intel!!
"The moronic imbecile that made the remarks about the military hit the deck and give me 20 push-ups."
THe US military is the pride of the world? Nope, the US military is made of volunteers who can't find anything else worthwhile to do. Do you know who they recruit? Anyone with no future, no education, no money find their way into the military.
HOw sorry is it that the US military and their leaders can't even manage not to get blown up every day in a place with no money, no organized resistance, and no real weapons.
Sorry the US military, US goverment is the finest pork barrel example in the work lead by idiots who couldn't have influence in the real world.
Expect them to be suckers for crap and over pay.. the record stands on its own...
yep the same vaunted military who paid $10,000 for a toilet seat -
"And the "six beers short of a sixpack" award goes to..."
To the likes of you who are contributing nothing to this blog. Spare the rest of us your rhetoric and bullshit, stick to the topic... For once.(if this is too much to ask of the Intel fanboys)
"anonymous said..."
'Besides, if we want to get technical, a dual core 2P system is effectively 4P, i.e. 4 cores."
'And the "six beers short of a sixpack" award goes to...'
To the same imbecile at Intel who came up with thier MCM concept. Processor sandwich anyone? I'll pass...
"To the same imbecile at Intel who came up with thier MCM concept. Processor sandwich anyone? I'll pass..."
So looking at Kenstfield vs 4x4, which implementation overall is better? (when factoring cost, energy, performance, power supplies).
Other than the elitism of "it's" not a true quad core, what is really wrong with this approach?
If you look down the line where there is potential to do wafer to wafer bonding (and effectively double CPU's that way as well, or look at a stacked, thru silicon, approach) are these also bad approaches? If you can get the performance to scale and do it in an economical manner why does it really matter how the end result is achieved. If Intel "glued" 4 single cores together and somehow got reasonable power consumption, performance and price I wouldn't care either.
MCM is much better for yield, bin splits and energy performance as you have the ability to pair processors together after sort while with "native" quad core you are limited by speedm characteristics of your worst 1 of the 4 cores.
It's just entertaining listening to folks complain about the MCM approach, but fail to look at it's performance scaling vs a single dual core chip. Factor in the economics described above and this is a FAR better solution than most people give it credit for. Ask yourself this if you just looked at the performance #'s not knowing what or how the chip was made would you even care/know?
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