Corporate users twiddle thumbs, wait for AMD, Intel

LARGE ENTERPRISES and corporations are waiting for Intel and AMD to make their plans for enterprise chips clear but don't have much time left to make their decisions.

Generally speaking, tenders and budgets for enterprise server kit in Europe run out at the end of December, so AMD and Intel had better get their act together or they'll miss out.

Jeff Smith, director of European operations at major mobo vendor Tyan, said that most of his customers are hanging fire to see how Intel and AMD chips compare.

That could mean a rush of orders for server kit in the last quarter of this year, as buyers dip their hands into their enterprise budgets or lose the budget entirely, said Smith.

Smith said that buying this sort of kit is not something enterprises want to do in a rushing hurry - they generally expect to get three years of use out of servers they buy. It's hardly the notebook market, after all.

He said customers he'd talked to felt that product life cycles on X86 server chips were getting to be shorter and shorter, but you can't rush a firm that's betting its enterprise or its workstation strategy into changing mobos and chips every year.

Tyan said that despite the merger with Mitac earlier this year, the firm was being run along practically identical lines, with its own P&L and retaining its own branding. It finds itself with less competition now Iwill has been borged into Flextronics. µ