2CPU.com » News » December 2003 » Intel buys Opteron Servers?

The Inquirer is reporting that Intel was caught with their hand in the cookie jar. It appears as if Intel may have acquired a number of Opteron-based servers from Appro.

Now the AMD folk are having fun wondering whether Intel is going to move its critical data centers to the Opteron platform, wants to find out how sharp are the teeth of the shark that may eat its Xeon lunch, or just want to take the servers apart for research and development purposes, no doubt, as our informant tells us, with pained expressions being the order of the day on Intel engineers' faces.

I'm sure Intel acquired the deceptacons Opterons for R&D, but stranger things have happened. Apparently no one at Intel has heard the phrase "No one's ever been fired for buying Intel." Take a look.

Gandalf SMP Ranger Posts: 570 Joined: 2001-09-14

#25439 Posted on: 12/15/2003 09:55 PM Andy Grove is now hiding in his bathroom and unavailable for comment. "Hey!! Get that forkin' camera out of here!" Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

jeh mad scientist Posts: 3716 Joined: 2000-08-06

#25440 Posted on: 12/16/2003 12:36 AM I really don't see a story here. Companies buy each other's products for research purposes all the time.

Occupant Registered User Posts: 2405 Joined: 2002-03-04

#25441 Posted on: 12/16/2003 12:48 AM Yup, they do... Its a slow news day... AMD probably has a few xeon servers kicking around, (Id be suprised if they didnt actually use them for like - work), Micosoft runs its accounting system on a Amdal Mainframe. (I saw that in the news a few months ago.) Iam sure ford has a few chevs in its fleet... Every airline in the world has a secret flyer program, not only flying thier own airline, but others as well... Its a competitive world out thier you have to know what other companies can do for thier clients so that you can do the same for yours.

Jim_ Administrator Posts: 3577 Joined: 2000-03-15

#25442 Posted on: 12/16/2003 12:53 AM Originally posted by Occupant Yup, they do... Its a slow news day... Yes, yes it is. [url="http://www.jimkirk.org"]jimkirk.org[/url] - Not a Myth any Longer. Just a Dad.

jeh mad scientist Posts: 3716 Joined: 2000-08-06

#25443 Posted on: 12/16/2003 01:11 AM The most interesting thing along these lines, something that really would be news (except that it's rather old news), is the fact that the process control for Intel's fabs is run on ... are you ready for this? ... Alphas running VMS. When even short periods of downtime on a fab would cost millions, they can't afford to take the chance of a BSOD. In fact they only made the move to Alphas relatively recently. Before that they were running on VMS on VAXes, well after the VAX line was retired. So when HP/CPQ/DEC gets done porting VMS to Itanic, you have a good idea who's going to be testing that out pretty early on.

HEMI Administrator Posts: 2745 Joined: 2001-12-18

#25444 Posted on: 12/16/2003 01:41 AM Originally posted by jeh ... Alphas running VMS. I wonder how many eyebrows that raised once the Alpha solution was recommended...Or maybe Intel just tapped HPaq to give them some machines. I like Alphas. Too bad they are essentially being buried. I work at a software company. We have several machines in-house running competing products for evaluation, etc. It's not exactly uncommon for competitors to want to see what the others are bringing to the table. Unix is user-friendly; it's just picky about its friends.

Mr Bill two by two, hands of blue Posts: 2939 Joined: 2002-02-16

#25445 Posted on: 12/16/2003 01:48 AM I'd bet they have a farm of in-house equipment so they can hook competitors systems up to a parallel load and test clock by clock the relative strengths as information for marketing as well as product development. My SMP rig [URL="http://personal.palouse.net/billshan/ghost.htm#A_Merlin"]Merlin[/URL]

jeh mad scientist Posts: 3716 Joined: 2000-08-06

#25446 Posted on: 12/16/2003 02:23 AM Originally posted by HEMI I wonder how many eyebrows that raised once the Alpha solution was recommended...Or maybe Intel just tapped HPaq to give them some machines. Remember that the original stuff, running on VMS on VAXes, was in place long before there were microprocessors capable of hosting "real" operating systems. The uptime and general reliability of a VMScluster is extremely impressive - many (including me) feel that VMS is the most reliable general-purpose OS available, period, and DEC gear has long been amenable to the various weird IO stuff you need for a process control environment. Moving to VMS on Alpha likely involved no (repeat, no) application code changes - just recompile. Drivers for the weird IO stuff would have to have minor changes. No other hardware alternative could make that claim. And nobody responsible for the fabs at Intel would want to trust their production lines to new code. Downtime on a fab is not "merely" very expensive in terms of chips not made. A fab once shut down can literally take months to get back up to the reliability levels Intel needs to maintain profitability at commodity prices. Moving to anything BUT another VMS host would be completely foolhardy in such an environment.

Forge mad scientist Posts: 720 Joined: 2001-05-12

#25447 Posted on: 12/16/2003 03:01 PM All logic aside, it'd still be fun to casually mention this to an Intel rep, and imply Intel needed 64bits. :P Registered Linux user 82133 (li.org has a short memory)

Gandalf SMP Ranger Posts: 570 Joined: 2001-09-14

#25448 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:38 PM Yes. But irony is a hard sell -- around here. Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

2CPU.com » News » December 2003 » Intel buys Opteron Servers?