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Old August 31st 04, 07:41 AM
Tony Hill
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On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 22:31:07 -0500, "Stephen Sprunk"
wrote:

"Tony Hill" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 01:08:41 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08...nium_sales_q2/


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


Too bad those are server prices, not per-CPU prices. If the average Opteron
were 2-way and the average Itanic were 32-way, that wouldn't be notable.
Too bad for Intel that's not the case.

A couple other interesting tid-bits from this articles:

- HP still sells 85% of all Itaniums by volume and 78% by revenue.

- SGI managed only 12.5% of all Itanium revenue, despite the
high-profile sales


Neither of those is particularly surprising, after HP dropped HPPA and Alpha
and now SGI is only a shell of its former self (though still employing some
top-notch folks).

- NEC actually had the highest average server cost for Itaniums at
$158,000 per server. SGI was only at $139,000 and HP much further
down at $52,000, though well ahead of Dell's average of $21,000


The latter three are not surprising; they fit in with general perception of
the quality vs. price tradeoffs each vendor is known for.


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.

NEC is the
standout; I hadn't paid any attention to them at all.


I think NEC might be a bit of oddity of statistics rather than
anything too meaningful. While they sold expensive servers, they only
sold 38 servers total for $6M in revenue. Those sorts of numbers give
you a pretty high margin of error.

- The top 6 Itanium vendors listed accounted for 98.7% of all Itanium
sales by volume and 98.1% by revenue. 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.


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.

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