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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

Dell has historically been a completely Intel shop, so the fact they are even tepidly considering AMD here is likely because of a large number of customer request for pricing and performance quotes.

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> Dell has historically been a completely Intel shop

Because Intel paid Dell and others to not use AMD[0][1]. Dell officially ended their Intel exclusivity 13 years ago when they agreed to sell servers with Opterons[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices%2C_Inc.....

[1] https://business-ethics.com/2010/07/23/0901-dell-inc-agrees-...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/dell-opts-for-amds-opteron/

But make no mistake about it, Intel has a fat wallet and will use it against AMD ( as confirmed in some leaked presentation )

Big discounts, kickbacks, "deals" and "programs" are being deployed and more on the way.

To put some perspective on this, Intel's Marketing, general and administrative costs in 2018 were 6.7 billion[0] whereas AMD's net revenue was 6.4 billion[1].

[0] https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2018/An...

[1] http://ir.amd.com/static-files/438f4934-2883-4c85-9193-d5218...

And as a potential customer it's important to remember that you're the one paying that $6.7 billion.

I'm reminded of that any time I see cheap products with slick marketing (mostly fast food) - you have to assume they're cutting corners in their actual product to pay for all that graphic design and video editing.

Or their revenue and income are so massive that taking a bit from it for advertising is a drop in the bucket. Intel has revenue of nearly 71 billion/year vs AMD at 6.5 billion.

That may be true, but despite that they still cut corners. See Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and the impact to the performance of Intel CPUs once mitigated. In fact, Intel recommended disabling HyperThreading if you want to be completely protected from the vulnerabilities.

And I hope some anonymous whistleblowers within Dell will do the right thing and expose the practice.

Expose what practice?

'Big discounts, kickbacks, "deals" and "programs" are being deployed and more on the way.' are generally perfectly legal.

> Expose what practice?

The practices that have resulted in Intel being sued/settling/fined by companies/states/FTC/EU/Japan.

Sort of. Maybe. But as an moderately large Intel customer, I assure you they are very afraid of any accusations of unfair practices or anti-trust behavior, so they are somewhat crippled in their ability to fight with money.

It was clear while Dell ended its exclusivity with Intel, it was still an Intel shop. They continue to push Intel machines across all front, offering AMD merely as a checkbox to avoid any anti competitive or legal problems.

HPE on the other hand tends to be a little more supportive.

And I could only guess there are lots of push from Intel to ask their customer not to offer any AMD machines.

I remember how bizarre that was at the time: Dell had stuck exclusive to Intel through the whole NetBurst era, despite AMD being superior. And then once Core 2 came out and Intel was back on top, Dell started selling AMD.

"tepidly"

No kidding ;)

"Initial performance studies on Rome based servers show expected performance"

Which is true, but misses the real point.

Even the sensational title “Rome: is it real”. Obviously it’s real. It’s fair to ask “how does it perform in real world scenarios”

Dell has been selling current generation AMD since at least mid last year. We have a few R6415 and R7415s at work.

Curious what type of workload you are using them for?

We're a VMware shop so I'd be hesitant to deploy non-Intel just because I don't want to get caught holding the bag in case AMD can't keep their momentum up for the next 5 years when we'd most likely looking to lifecycle the environment.

What kind of workload do you run that relies on hardware? I mean you mention, you use VMware anyway.

Manufacturing is weird like that. We like VMware because we can refresh our compute and storage without downtime, since a lot (almost al) of the applications are not built for HA.

I think no OEM can wait till 2022 for a decent answer of Intel though.

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