"keith" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:36:41 +0000, Nick Maclaren wrote:

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.

And do you suppose that this is happening with Opterons too?

It is my recollection that this is exactly the market that AMD originally
had in mind for Opteron. While many were making comparisons to Itanium
(which AMD skillfully has never denied), all of their marketing material was
about displacing Xeon systems. The relative pricing of the chips should
also be an indication of this.


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.

I'm not sure the average system price matters much here. If the UP or SMP
Opteron (1xx and 2xx) servers/workstations sell tremendously well and
the 4P servers sell tremendously well (for their segment), the average
system price will still be far lower than any Itanic (or Z, for that
matter).

I'm not sure how one compares chip ASP, on one hand, to system price on
the other.

As you know, you can't. Companies such as Stratus will make
fault-tolerant, fully redundant systems selling for hundreds of thousands of
dollars using $1K/$2K Xeons. Thus far, these companies have not used
Opterons. Likely it has nothing at all to do with whether Opterons can or
cannot be used in such systems, but is due to the fact that such systems
take a *long time* to design, build and validate... and that their customers
expect certain attributes, including various name-brand components.

The real point here is that you cannot simply count systems sold across all
market segments, then make some general statement about the relative
success/failure of a component used within a fraction of them. This is not
an apples/apples comparison, and I suspect that many people know this - even
those who report/repeat such numbers. Of course, there is always the
problem of properly identifying each market segment as well as the intended
target of the component. Once you can do that, you have a better chance of
determining what 'success' and 'failure' really means.

On a somewhat related note, it was reported that Bob Evans passed away very
recently. He led the S/360 architecture team, which apparently cost $5B
back in the '60s - at at time when IBMs annual revenues were just North of
$3B. This would be the equivalent of Intel spending multiple tens of
millions of dollars on a new architecture (no, I am not trying to equate
S/360 with Itanium in anything except corporate investment terms). That
one turned out spectacularly successful, and I doubt that Itanium achieve
even a small fraction of that success - but if they can carve out, and hold
onto, a niche in the lucrative high-end space, it may not be as unsuccessful
as many would like it to be (or, it might be - but time will tell).

Regards,
Dean