OT: Dell to offer linux pre-installed on desktops

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 01:16:43AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Up until last year, Dell did not ship anything with AMD processors*.
> On the surface, this was a silly choice: AMD had better
> price/performance and even just performance in a number of important
> areas.  Compounding the mystery, they switched to supporting AMD just
> when AMD no longer was the performance leader.
> 
> There must have been some kind of sweet secret deal between Dell and
> Intel that kept AMD out.  Perhaps this deal broke down when AMD sued
> Intel over just this kind of thing.  Or perhaps the performance gap
> got to hard to ignore.
> 
> Apple switched from PPC to x86 roughly the same time.  They said they
> were going to Intel when AMD had the best x86.  But they knew that
> Intel was going to pull ahead at the time Apple would start to ship
> x86 boxes.  I think Apple got to ship some of the first systems with
> Intel Core.  It also sounded as if Apple made some kind of sweet deal
> with Intel.

Intel has the best complete solution for chipset and cpu and wireless
combined.  And the Core processors are a very good design.  Other than
development machines apple never used the P4 at all.  I have no doubt
intel kept apple well informed about what their new CPU design was going
to do.

> So Dell should have known that they could have ignored AMD for a few
> more months and been out of the woods on performance.  But on price, I
> think AMD beats Intel, even now.  They have to.  And they clearly gave
> an extraordinary deal to get Dell -- AMD were so hungry for it.

But they couldn't ignore the server area where for 4 or more processors
the opteron is still superior.

> It appears that Intel has managed to market a bait-and-switch.
> Current gen Intel chips are better than current gen AMD chips.  But if
> you want them at a low price, Intel will sell you last-gen chips (P4)
> which are inferior to AMD chips.  Maybe the P4 stuff will be phased
> out soon.

Intel has already said last year that the P4 will slowly be phased out
as their fabs move over to making Core 2 designs.

> http://www1.ca.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/dt_basic?c=ca&cs=cadhs1&l=en&s=dhs
> "Basic Desktops":
> $369 Dell E521 Semperon (cost reduced Athlon; includes x86-64)
> $479 Dell E520 Celeron D (cost reduced P4; no x86-64 AFAIK)
> 
> "Mainstream Desktops":
> $579  E520 Pentium D
> $489  E521 Athlon 64
> 
> "Performance Desktops"
> Only Intel chips, some of which are P4.

I suspect part of that is that Dell probably has long term delivery
contracts with intel, and tend to sell mostly what is cheap because that
is their market.  High volumes of cheap junk.

> In each pair, the CPUs are close enough to being equal (to consumers,
> not fans).  The AMDs are considerably cheaper.  I worry that AMD will
> (again) get a stigma of being cheap, not just inexpensive.

Well AMD claims to be working on a new revision of the K8 that is
supposed to get a good boost in performance (Their claims make it sound
like they could match or probably even beat the current Core 2 design).
And AMD still has the better memory interface and multi cpu support.

--
Len Sorensen
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