Source: AMD Moves Up Istanbul Launch To Counter Intel's Nehalem

AMD on Tuesday seemed to be retreating to a position familiar to it in the past few years -- a concession that with Nehalem, Intel may own the flat-out performance crown at the high end of its offerings, but that AMD's story is about price-for-performance, energy efficiency, investment protection and overall value for the majority of customers.

"If you look at the market for servers in general, only about 5 percent of the market buys the top-speed-in-the-bin processor. The majority buys the midrange product. In our own mix, you'll even see that AMD sells 20 to 25 percent of our processors in the low power range. Our customers aren't necessarily looking for the highest performance processor," Lewis said. She also questioned the real cost in terms of power for record-shattering marks the Xeon 5500 series is achieving on virtualization benchmarks.

Taylor, declaring "this competition is far from over," added criticism of the price and power draw of DDR3 memory, featured exclusively in Intel's new server architecture. AMD won't transition its Opteron platform from cheaper DDR2 until 2010.

The custom system builder who said Istanbul's release date had been pulled in wasn't buying much of it and called into question several of AMD's corporate moves in the past few years.

"On the whole price thing, look, it's not a good position for AMD to be in the server market. The difference between $50 for a processor and $100 for a processor doesn't matter much to us," he said. "But it all boils down to, they shouldn't have bought ATI, they shouldn't have signed Dell and it distracted them from focusing on the channel. Then Intel pulled their head out of their a-- and reinvented their architecture and here we are," he said.

Still, the same source, while impressed with the Xeon 5500 series on performance grounds, was less than charitable about Intel's relationship with smaller partners on the Nehalem launch.

"It's been tough for the white-box guys, because there was no information available on part numbers and pricing from the distributors until launch day. The Tier 1s had all that weeks in advance," he said.

Another source from a West Coast-based Intel partner company that makes custom high-end systems confirmed the lack of visibility into component availability ahead of the Nehalem launch. The partner, who also asked not to be named, specifically said chassis and power supplies were difficult for partners below the Tier 1 and Tier 2 level to source in advance of Monday.

Still other channel partners, like Paul Ling of EPROM Computer Systems in Markham, Ontario, seemed bemused by the whole affair, saying that the very latest products from either Intel or AMD rarely played a part in their business activities. Companies with limited white-box offerings like EPROM and Glasgow, Ky.-based Ultratech Computer Systems, anticipated few of their customers demanding either Nehalem or Shanghai products any time soon.

"We're not in the middle of a hotbed of technology by any means," said Ultratech's John Berry. "We're the IT shop for little doctor's and dentist's offices, that sort of thing. Invariably, for most of the businesses that we work for, they don't need a quad-core Xeon processor sitting there glowing in the dark."

Berry said his company sold "maybe a dozen new systems in a good month" but that even that small number had fallen off during the current economic recession.