An AMD interview about Opterons and Xeons, but who exactly is asking the questions?
Intel's Xeon processors are the latest Big Thing™ in tech (if you're listening to Intel, that is), but as AMD's senior Vice President Nigel Dessau has to say it's old hat.
He's written a blog post on AMD's blog site titled The Sincerest Form of Flattery, which is essentially an interview that he performed by himself on himself, asking questions that he deemed to be most relevant, likely or helpful to answer.
Not only has he mentioned quite plainly that the new Nehalem-based Xeon chips are "a copy, at least as far as the architecture is concerned.", but he's also given them a very endearing pet name - Opti-Clone.
Apart from the slightly entertaining name-calling, there's also some good AMD opinion in here too - it begins with whether AMD is scared of Intel's current performance lead. Turns out they aren't bothered much by it, since their largest cash cow lies here:
More than ninety percent of what we sell is not our fastest part. The market for the fastest part is always small and in this economy it's likely even smaller. And while Intel may leapfrog AMD in raw performance (for the moment, at least) with the - oh so flattering - overhaul of their server architecture, they are also introducing a new learning-curve and resource-drain for an already cost-sensitive and disruption-averse IT environment.
There's a car analogy in there too, essentially saying that the fastest isn't going to get you across town any faster, but it's relatively lighthearted stuff, and is worth a read.
Finishing the blog with a giggle, Nigel asked himself "But they win over 30 benchmarks. Surely that matters for something?". He replied, simply:
Only if you run your business on benchmarks.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012