Dell in centre of Opteron-Itanium paradox

DURING AN INTERVIEW ZD Net conducted with senior VP Joe Marengi, the general manager made it absolutely clear where his sympathies lie on AMD's Opteron microprocessor.

Marengi told ZD Net that Dell can't see a big adoption of Opteron happening. He added that supporting new stuff, whether hardware or software, costs a lot of money.

But if Marengi truly believes what he said about Opteron, his reply raises two rather obvious contradictions.

If adoption matters, why is Dell selling Itanium servers? Does Dell really believe that Itanium adoption will exceed that of Opteron? It surely doesn't believe the Aberdeen Group's projections about broad Itanium deployment? So why the massive contradiction?

If the economic cycle we went through was not a time for casual investing, why did Dell invest in Itanium? Is that investment less than it would be for Opteron? I wouldn't think so. So why the double standards with Opteron?

In a reply to a question about the 64-bit competition, Marengi boasted that Dell has 32-bit multiprocessor systems that thrash the 64-bit stuff hands-down. But he also told ZD Net that when the time for 64-bit comes, the Itanium looks like it will be the baby.

Where are those benchmarks? Dell's search engine and Google could not find them.

If we could see the benchmark results, we would ask, where are the Opteron numbers?

If Dell is so confident about being more successful without Opteron, then it should publish the benchmark numbers that corroborate its firmly held belief.

This is the second time that Dell has attempted to explain its Opteron decision. Dell President Kevin Rollins added to the contradictory list by saying: "To go with an AMD solution becomes problematic for us from a cost and kind of an ice-breaking standpoint," Rollins said. "We believe 64-bit will be a technology customers will want and will migrate to it. It's a market that's emerging but not quite ripe yet."

If the market is not yet ripe for 64-bit technology, and Opteron - with all its migration advantages - gets rejected by Dell at this stage of the game, why is Dell selling the migratory challenged Itanium?

All that Dell has said about its Opteron decision has been contradictory. Wouldn't it be easier for Dell if it just told the truth? Dell could say something like this.

"Even though the Opteron platform is the most technically advanced, offers the best value for money, and is the best migratory platform to 64-bit computing, Intel offered a financial inducement we couldn't afford to ignore".

One sentence says it all. So let's stop beating around the bush.

Maybe someone from Dell can put the Opteron record straight because what's been trotted out so far is full of contradiction, absurdity, and double standards.

So the INQUIRER readership, which includes many Dell customers, will be waiting for Dell to make a credible response to what's been said. We'll also wait for the benchmark numbers to be made available on the Web.

But of course, we won't be holding our breath. µ

L'INQ
ZD Net interview