Researcher Gartner disses AMD chips

RESEARCH ORGANISATION Gartner, which, we learn, numbers Intel amongst its hefty fee-paying customers, has come up with a statement urging large enterprises to "ignore" a selection of HP offerings sporting AMD chips.

The statement appears on ZDNet's Techupdate pages, penned by a pair of stars of the order of the Gartner over here .

HP's market for its Compaq D315 Business PC is "small-to-midsize businesses and government customers, such as schools, that buy PCs solely on the basis of price," they say. Suggesting, it seems, that these organisations don't really mind if the PCs they buy don't actually work, so long as they're cheap.

At the heart of the Compaq D315 Business PC is the award-winning AMD Athlon XP processor, says AMD. Which is precisely the problem as far as Gartner is concerned.

"It will be tough for the price of the AMD platform to drop below the price of the basic Intel platform", says Gartner. "Large buyers therefore are unlikely to shift to the AMD system. "

"Where higher performance is a requirement, an AMD-based system can offer a better price-to-performance ratio," Gartner concedes, expecting these systems "to be aggressively priced as AMD tries to open up the market."

"Large enterprises should ignore D315 for now," it says. "Small-to-midsize businesses that are looking for product-only offerings can consider it as alternative to white box products." µ