On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 18:36:41 +0000, Nick Maclaren wrote:

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.

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

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.

--
Keith