Dell Servers: What’s the Deal With AMD?
The VAR Guy has been eating crow on this little item most of the day. On May 19, two channel partners told The VAR Guy that Dell planned to stop offering AMD processors on its servers. Then, The VAR Guy saw an alleged email from a Dell channel representative to the resellers, apparently confirming the news. Only, both Dell and AMD on May 20 said The VAR Guy was wrong. (Dead wrong.) Yes indeed, Dell is moving forward with AMD on servers.
Here’s where The VAR Guy’s confusion started. According to a well-connected source close to Dell:
“The R805 was the last [Dell server] machine that was AMD only. All other models had an AMD option. Both the option and the R805 just got dropped effective 6/30.”
A Dell insider also seem to confirm the news. According to an apparent email from Dell Global Channel Sales to resellers, Dell didn’t have any plans for AMD processors in the company’s next generation of servers.
But all that changed May 20 when…
- An AMD VP told The VAR Guy he’d be surprised if Dell plans to stop offering servers with AMD processors.
- Dell said the company remains committed to AMD on servers. Check out comment #1 from Matt McGinnis (Dell) below. The VAR Guy is now sitting down to eat some crow.
AMD: The Chips Are Down
Server speculation aside, Dell’s recent pattern has been to move away from AMD-oriented desktop systems.
Dell introduced its first AMD-based servers in October 2006. At the time AMD’s Opteron processor was a super hot play in the server market. The reason: Opteron ran 32- and 64-bit applications equally well. Meanwhile, Intel was struggling to regroup from a failed all-out push to promote pure 64-bit applications on high-end Itanium processors, at the expense of 32-bit performance on Itanium.
Intel gradually recovered from some missteps, and by early 2008 Dell stopped offering AMD processors on many of its PC systems. (But contrary to The VAR Guy’s earlier claim, that mindset isn’t repeating itself on Dell servers.)
No doubt, AMD has struggled mightily in recent years. But there are signs of hope. CEO Dirk Meyer on May 18 said AMD expects its core business to make a net profit by year’s end, according to Reuters.
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This speculations is absolutely untrue. Dell will introduce a refresh of its server portfolio with the new 6 core AMD Opteron processors (code name Istanbul) in the very new future. AMD is a part of the future Dell server roadmap beyond this near-term refresh.
In fact three Dell representatives were just meeting with a group of reviewers at AMD today (myself included).
With AMD we built the industry’s first servers optimized for virtualization – the Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 rack servers. The PowerEdge R905 based on AMD Opteron is a great example of how we’ve fine-tuned our servers to provide virtualization performance. It is an ideal formula of processor technology, massive memory capacity, and I/O scalability. We’ve seen some excellent success and performance results with our AMD virtualization systems and we expect that to get even better with Istanbul.
Matt: The VAR Guy would write a longer reply but he’s sitting down and eating that healthy serving of crow. Oh, and cleaning a little egg his face too. Thank you for replying to the inquiry.
You really can’t blame yourself for that though. When you get what appears to be reliable information from a reputable source you just expect it to be true. Chances are stories just changed when someone saw a price tag somewhere.
NetApex: Thanks but in this case The VAR Guy was foolish to fire first and ask questions later. Generally speaking, Dell and AMD spokespeople are responsive folks. Had The VAR Guy simply waited for their replies to his inquiry, the blog above (and the wrong info) would never have materialized.