opteron ?

James Ralston qralston+ml.rhl-beta at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon Jul 21 23:35:20 UTC 2003


On 2003-07-21 at 15:19:31-0700 Jesse Keating <hosting at j2solutions.net> wrote:

> On Monday 21 July 2003 15:28, James Ralston wrote:
> 
> > The Opteron is AMD's server chip, and is thus best paired with
> > RHEL.
> 
> Ugh.. sounds like a marketing call on that one.  Guess we should
> strip all the server stuff out of RHLP since it's all better suited
> for RHEL anyway...

IMHO...

It makes sense for Red Hat to put Opteron support into RHEL, as both
the Opteron and RHEL are specifically targeted to servers, and the
Opteron is available (more or less) *now*.  Do you honestly expect Red
Hat to spend development effort making Cambridge support a processor
that hasn't been released yet, when the only "benefit" would be to
undercut RHEL sales?

If you want to complain about somebody, complain about AMD, as they're
the ones who decided to release the Opteron before the Athlon 64:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_608,00.html

But honestly, there's not that much that AMD could've done, because no
matter how unpleasant the fact is, AMD *needed* to have Microsoft put
native AMD64 support into Windows before they could bring out the
Athlon 64.  Microsoft doesn't control the server space, so AMD didn't
have to wait for them there, but Microsoft (still) rules the desktop
with an iron fist.

If Athlon 64 chips were flying off the shelves in desktop systems
right now (pre-loaded with Windows XP 64-Bit Edition), then including
native AMD64 support in RHLP would be a no-brainer.  But they're not,
and as much as I hate to say it, the future of the AMD64 architecture
(and AMD in general) is far from certain.





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