Corporations slow to adopt the Athlon
Should corporations stick to the Intel bandwagon?
October 12, 2000
by Eric Svetcov
Yesterday I listened to the AMD earnings conference call and was troubled. For all of AMD’s success over the last year, they are still not selling well into corporations. And frankly, I think some IT departments might be missing the boat.
Earlier this year I wrote an article that mentioned four important items to consider when buying a system: Stability, Price, Performance and Availability. In all four, the Duron and Athlon beat Intel except at the very low end ($399 computers that frankly nobody should buy for a corporation).
Stability - Over the last year with the MTH issue and 1.113 GHz P3, we have seen Intel take some serious falls with regards to stability. These were released products that had serious defects. AMD has not had similar problems with either the Duron or the Athlon. The systems I have in production have performed flawlessly - both as servers and desktop computers.
Price - Athlon and Duron processors cost about the same as an Intel processor two speed grades slower. Additionally, on the low-end, the Duron is about 10-15% faster than an equivalently clocked Celeron. There is no doubt that the price leader is AMD, even if the motherboards cost $5 to $10 more on average than an equivalent Intel motherboard (note: that price disparity is falling).
Performance - The Duron flat out beats the Celeron hands down. I don’t think anyone can dispute that. And the Athlon is at least equivalent to a P3 at the same clock speed and in floating point intensive tasks trounces the P3. Also of note, the fastest x86 processor on the market is an Athlon at 1.1GHz with the 1.2GHz on its way by the end of October. And where is Intel? They have decided to postpone the rerelease of the 1.113 GHz P3 until late Q1 2001.
Availability - The processors are available from any number of white box vendors in the speeds that you want with just about any configuration you can dream up. Here is a selection of five folks from different companies who were very responsive during my latest request for pricing on a system.
Sterling Harris at Monarch Computer Systems - sterling@monarchcomputer.com
Jovita Chan at CyberPower, Inc. - jc001@cyberpowerinc.com
Steve Rebbick at Polywell Systems - srebb@polywell.com
Gautam Shah at Colfax International - shah@colfax-intl.com
Doug Bourne at Sys - dbourne@sys.com
Notes on vendors listed - I have done business with Jovita at CyberPower and have been pleased with their systems. Monarch, Polywell and Sys all have excellent reputations and I have not heard anything about Colfax Int’l. I should point out that in addition to a standard line of products, Sys also has an arrangement with Kryotech, the folks that create actively cooled Athlon systems. If you need the highest performance Athlon in the world, and are willing to pay for it, you should contact Doug Bourne at Sys for a 1.6GHz Athlon.
As always, I invite comment - positive and negative - and will post your responses in the letters section. Please send your comments to letters@IThell.com.
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