AMD [IBM] press release

[Dominic Wu]

Brand names do not necessarily add significantly to the price of all units.
In the cases of both Dell and Intel, economy of scale kicks in and the
heavily marketed "Dude, you're getting a Dell" and "Intel Inside", while do
nothing to add intrinsic value to the end product, nonetheless has the end
effect of lower Workstation and CPU cost for the masses.  If only AMD sold
as many Opterons (or Athlons, for that matter) as Intel does the P4's and
the P4 Xeons, you'd see more performance at even better values.

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	beowulf-admin at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-admin at beowulf.org]  On
Behalf Of Bob Drzyzgula
Sent:	Wednesday, November 20, 2002 9:50 AM
To:	Alan Scheinine
Cc:	beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject:	Re: AMD [IBM] press release

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 04:07:11PM +0100, Alan Scheinine wrote:
>
>    This is one point in which we clearly have a difference of
> opinion concerning the computer market in general.  During several
> years of asking for price quotes, it has been my impression that a
> high-performance "server" from Compaq or HP (when they were separate
> companies) had a price that was about twice what I would need to pay
> to get an equivalent computer assembled locally, at the same level
> of performance and sometimes with the same motherboard.

Certainly brand names do add significantly to the price of
a unit. But also, top-quality enclosures and power supplies
add real value, and usually these systems include several
years of on-site service. The value of some of these things
will vary from customer to customer, and for many people, the
locally-assembled, or self-assembled option will be a better
choice. Of course, with non-commodity systems, such as those
based on the Itanium, the Power4, UltraSPARC, etc., these
latter choices are often not an option.

Snip...