Dell sells AMD Opterons through back door

DELL IS KNOWN for its stance on AMD, or its lack of a stance on AMD. The power games, wishy washy statements and brinksmanship are getting very old and dull, and there is little that is fact publicly available.

We all know the drill, you call Dell, it gives you one of 12 standard blow off lines, and half heartedly tries to convince you that you don't want Opterons, contrary to the reason you called Dell in the first place.

The 64-bit question is however, what does it tell you if you are serious? Well, if it thinks you mean business, and you have something that makes it think twice before blowing you off, it will try a little harder. A corporate account with a buying history does nicely, and with that in mind, an intrepid reader asked nicely, and got a response.

First, Dell tried the old SWAT lines - company reliability and stability. That didn't work. Then Dell tried to throw out a few benchmarks, and that got no further, but the benchmarks are incredibly funny. More on those later. Lastly, it passed the buck to Intel and said the person should call Intel for a better brainwashing on its vision and roadmaps.

None of this worked, most likely because of the benchmarks that some sales brainchild sent to the customer. Look at these two screencaps.*

Forgive the low quality, but this is what they say. First, they compare a Xeon 3.60 to an Opteron 2.4, a valid comparison by any account, but that is about the depth of the tech. The second page does list that it has an 800FSB, HT, DDR2-400 (why god, why?) and EM64T. So much for disclosure, you can't get a Xeon 3.60 with anything but those specs.

The specific tests, followed by margin of victory were Abaqus Standard 32 bit (4%), Amber 8 64 bit (15%), Fluent 6.1 64 bit (4%), Linpack Peak 64 bit (58%) SPECfp 2000 64 bit (9%) and Linux build 64 bit (9%). Interesting choices I must say, nebulous yet authoritative sounding if you don't think about it.

Page two lists 5 SPEC benches followed by SAP R/3, TPC-C and MMB3, but there are no Opteron scores for the last two. The numbers show AMD winning three of the six contested ones by small margins, two are essentially tied, and Intel handily winning SPECfp 2000 base. One out of six isn't that bad is it, even if it a repeat of one of the ones from the first page?

So, Dell sends benches that show a pretty handy set of wins for HPC/FP heavy computational users, and a set of own goals for more Int heavy loads. The problem with this? The guy was after servers for Int heavy calculations. Doh!

You can't win them all, but if you are Dell, you have to try somehow. What do you do if the customer doesn't believe you after the convincing stories above? You sell them Opterons. The person who sent me the benchmark missive either wasn't big enough or persistent enough, but if you are, you can buy Opterons from Dell now. You just have to convince Dell that you are out the door if you don't get what you want and you are big enough to care about.

If you make it through the, yawn, excuse me, persuasive yet scintillating speech, and satisfy the above criteria, Dell will sell you Opterons, but only through 'back channels' and quietly, very quietly. In fact, please don't let anyone know, it could lead to some embarrassing phone calls. Keep this between you and me please. Happy social engineering people, let me know how you do. µ

* DELL ASKED us to remove these slides because they are "Dell Confidential". We've done that. We'll give you another angle a little later. [10:42 16 December 2004] L'INQ
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