Counting the foolish efforts

AMD has recently setup ticker display billboards in Times Square in New York City and along Route 101 in California's Silicon Valley. According to Brent Kerby, AMD's product marketing manager for Opteron, the display shows a theoretical electric bill representing the worldwide cost incurred by companies running servers with Intel's Xeon chips instead of AMD's Opteron chips. Currently the amount exceeds $1 billion, aggregating $24 roughly per second.

The locations that AMD has chosen to display the tickers are very strategic. One billboard is situated in Times Square only blocks away from the debt clock that inspired it. The other is along U.S. Highway 101, in a spot where it is sure to be seen by Silicon Valley executives on their daily commute.

According to Nathan Brookwood, head of market research outfit Insight64, in Saratoga, California AMD has the advantage over Intel on power consumption, at least for now. Over the last two years AMD processors have been using a lot less power than Intel's.

AMD has started playing the same game excelling in which Intel has managed to keep majority consumers away from AMD processors which undoubtebly outperform their counterparts. But AMD has still got to learn a lot more about marketing. In the words of Jim McGregor, analyst with InStat/MDR "If AMD can learn one thing from Intel, it's about how best to use its resources toward effective marketing. AMD may have learned to be a technology leader, but it hasn't learned how to be a market leader. There's a big difference."

Dance of Dell

The World Congess on Information Technology (WCIT) concluded on the 5th of May inTexas. Nothing very new happened there. But the news that caused ripples was Dell joining the Green Grid. Though Dell is not a technology company (all it does it assembling PCs that aren't even best in the world) and what steps it takes haven't ever bothered me.

Though Dell was not alone to join the nexus, APC and VMware also joined the Green Grid along witgh Dell. Since few years Dell has seen its server market slump against the energy efficient and faster Opteron powered servers sold by Sun, HP, IBM and many more. Knowing the fact that enterprise customers do full study before deciding on what product to buy, and hence calculate the profitabilities like no other home user does; Dell can't cater them just anything that sells by its name.

The Green Grid comprises of companies like AMD, IBM, HP, Rackable Systems and Egenera; and I don't find Dell standing anywhere near them if technological abilities are considered. The main purpose of forming this group was to do research and development to increase computing power by reducing the energy consumptions of processors in future. I wonder how could dell help in doing that.

Dell's move only shows the level of distrust that even the staunch supporters of Intel have in it. Afterall How many of the Intel's claims have come true so far. HP has already paid much price for having blind faith on Intel regarding the Itanium. Dells message is clear, we sell intel products only because it sells ( it's the product of general masses) but it hasn't got a future for sure.