En intressant artikel som kanske kan vara en förklaring till AMDs dåliga kvartalssiffror men samtidigt lovande för AMDs vidkommande
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39201
Subject: AMDDell
Paul
There have been market forces far beyond what Mercury reported that have affected what is happening. I retired from Sandia National Labs last year as a GS-16 (super GS executive grade) in procurement. Mercury did not note that Intel's shipments of processors to HPC users in the US government agencies fell to 0 in the first quarter and the reason Dell is scarfing up AMD production is that the new GSA PC purchasing regulations make the 20 watts of the Intel Northbridge 20 watts too many on the power consumption scale. Dell traditionally sells 80%+ to governments and corporate business users. The corporate buyers also have major electric bills and GSA estimates that each watt of power usage on a PC costs $1 per year(based on 11 cents perKWh) [http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=11894] and that is going up. (IBM wasn't blowing smoke last year when they said that power costs will soon outstrip purchase costs)
The following press release from Sandia Labs put the energy consumption issue from the government's point of view in black and white. "Red Storm is Sandia’s largest high-performance computer, but is thrifty in its use of power. It uses 2.2 megawatts, roughly half of other supercomputers of its class. This means that comparatively less of Red Storm’s energy is converted to useless heat." http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2006/red-storm....
You may find the rest of the story interesting about some conclusions about the relative technology merits between AMD and Intel. The Intel powered Thunderbird is next door so side by side comparisons are easy. So at $20 per machine per year if everything else is the same x500,000 pc's a year that is not chump change. Most government computers do distributed computing work when no one is at the console. Over the 5 year expected life of the PC's and the $100 per PC lower cost buying AMD, that figures to be $100,000,000 savings on that one years pc purchase. That is definitely not chump change.
The Mercury numbers do not include direct US government shipments. Also since Dell and AMD both use cash basis accounting, they do not include shipments to the government in their quarterly reports until they get paid. 1Q shipments to the US government get paid in 2Q. So you will always have a quarter lag until all shipments get paid for. That distorts Intel's 1Q numbers upward because the US government no longer buys significant volumes of Intel chips but Intel gets paid in 1Q for the 4Q 2006. AMD and Dell, to a lesser extent, are paying the price in their financials.
The problem with the Gartner and Mercury numbers is that they omit government purchases. Ask the Mercury rep if they included the deliveries of 386 chips for use in the electronics of the F15 and F16C fighters or the Pentium Pros for upgrades in the AWACS and Wild Weasel aircraft in the last quarter (yes IBM still makes both of them for the government's use) or the deliveries to Cray for both classified and unclassified projects. Also ask him if they include US Government purchases of desktops.
The 939 isn't going away soon because it has certain design characteristics that make it the basis of the next generation of military electronics as in the new F/AE-18 Wild Weasel. It may be IBM making it rather than AMD under the second source regulations. I find it interesting that I just got a 939 4000 that is coded 0712 and is LCB9E rather than the CXXXX that indicates the Dresden plant. AS Bruce Gudmundsson put it in a TV interview recently the race between Stealth technology and Radar is a race between materials science and computer technology. With the comparative rates of improvement and decreasing costs of electronics, he will bet on electronics.
AS to the Intel rep, ask him for his druggist's name. Then ask him how many DARPA HPC awards for computer technology Intel received at SuperComputing '06 last November in Tampa despite having 30 core 2 Duo and 1 Quad core entries. The answer is 0. Then ask him how many AMD got and for which chip. The answer is 4 for the 939/940. IBM got the other 8. Ask him where Intel finished in DARPA's Petascale contract competition. Answer is last IBM split honors with AMD/Cray and IBM has agreed to make the P7 interchangable with the AM3+. Sun's Rock was 3rd. Intel's wonderful technology has shut them out of the HPC market through the end of 2010.
Dell made the move they had to to protect their sales to US government agencies and AMD has had to face some dislocations to meet the demands of the new market. The trickle down effect is probably as significant because state and local agencies and school districts that use federal grant money to buy new computers have to follow the GSA guidelines. The size of these markets in one year are about as much as 4-5 years worth of the enthusiast market. Not hard to figure who wins and who loses. Also there is a lot more than meets the eye going on.
Ed Hinders