AMD press release

[Alan Scheinine]

   I lost the reference but someone at work indicated to me an
URL which talked about a cluster of 128 Power4 for 78,000 dollars.
I looked at the article and saw in the footnotes that 78,000 dollars
was for four CPUs (plus memory, disk).  The article also said that
the price of this cluster was good because it is similar to the
price of Itanium 2 computers, about 78,000 dollars for a 4-processor unit.
I find these numbers difficult to believe but my point is more general
and more abstract.  Computers tagged as "servers" often have high prices
when sold as complete computers.  This may be relevant the rumors that
AMD wants to focus on the "server" market for the Opteron.  Does this
mean there will be very few Opteron chips, available only as costly
servers?  Bob Drzyzgula asked: What is the sense of list members as to
when x86-64 will be a viable platform for scientific computing?  My own
opinion is that the answer is "Now".  There is already scientific
computing for the Alpha.  So my doubts regard the hardware aspect.
For AMD 32-bit, Pentium and Xeon, I can get the motherboards made by
Tyan and most of the motherboards on the Supermicro WWW pages.  But on
those pages I do not see any Itanium 2 mother boards.  For low-cost
clusters, Opteron motherboards sold like Pentium mother boards would
be great.  But I have nightmares that if AMD can only produce a small
quantity of Opterons, then they will seek to create a market in which
an Opteron computer will be a source of very high profits.
Alan