FIRMS THAT HAVE committed to large blade commitments and " green" payoffs have told the INQ they want to know whether firms like Intel, AMD, Sun, HP and even IBM will put their money behind what they're promising by developing future tech.

A senior datacentre manager told the INQ this evening that customers of chip vendors are being told over and over again about chip roadmaps, and asked to commit to buying tin, without the microprocessor guys giving any indication when the software makers will be brought into line.

"IO," said one manager of a major datacentre, is the great big bottleneck. He said that AMD blades performed better by between 10 and 50 per cent in his corporation, and he'd asked Intel over and over again when it would deliver this kind of throughput. If it can't produce chipsets, who can, he asked.

He is chip agnostic - indeed he said that in terms of cost, microprocessors were the least thing on his mind. The cost of developing SMP for multicore " solutions" is on his mind because his bosses needed to know, in a real time environment, which was the best answer.

The senior man, who declined to be named, said the microprocessor vendors repeated endlessly their claims, and put him under non disclosure agreements (NDAs).

His firm, he said, had been promised things endlessly by Intel, Sun, IBM and AMD, but his bosses demanded to know which benefits would deliver advantages in financial terms.

The software suppliers are as culpable as the chip vendors, he said. The chip vendors are totally amortised in relation to the huge software costs, which is why he had tipped up at IDF, Shanghai, paying for the trip himself.

Intel had promised him an answer for two years on IO, he said, but he is still waiting for it. It is getting crucial for his business.

He wants an answer to questions AMD, Intel and the others are not giving. And he needs an answer for his bosses and his customers, fast. µ