HP announced that it closed a 3-year deal to sell 1,000 workstations to Lucasfilm, Ltd. A 333 system per year sale to Bank of America wouldn't warrant a press release, but you can understand why this sale did. We're talking Yoda here, for Luke's sake.
This Lucasfilm deal, which is not AMD's first deal with George Lucas' film/videogame empire, was brought to AMD by HP's dual core, dual processor xw9300 workstation, a machine that has an identically-wrapped dual/dual Xeon counterpart, the xw8200. HP's model numbering scheme is arbitrary except that "Xeon plus 1,100" says something about HP's take on the pecking order. So does HP's decision to issue its release smack in the middle of Intel's signature event, Intel Developer Forum.
How big a deal is this deal? Not big, either in terms of units or dollars for HP or AMD. But it is a prestige win for both companies that will attract more interest from commercial prospects than sales to universities or rankings near the top of the supercomputing cluster leaderboard (HP sez, "in your face, Dell!").
Crowing about Opteron is also interesting in light of HP's alleged history. According to the anti-trust complaint that AMD filed against Intel, HP suffered the wrath of Lord Xeon after closing a maiden deal with AMD to equip HP desktops. You may have heard that said deal required AMD's gifting HP a million CPUs to assuage HP's fears that Intel would retaliate. AMD says that Intel proved HP's fears justified, and forced HP to bury its heathen desktops alive mere moments before they were to ship, and to disavow those few that clawed their way into the channel. If that really went down, it lost HP some money. There's a decent margin in desktops built with freebie CPUs.
HP hasn't exactly placed a cadre of its lawyers at Hector Ruiz's disposal, but HP is showing itself to be a friend of Intel's enemy, and we all know that the friend of your enemy is a very bad person.
With AMD's lawsuit edging ever nearer its first day in court, I can't help but see this cunningly-timed announcement as AMD and HP blowing a loud, wet executive raspberry in one-time best bud Intel's direction. But at least one media outlet chose to redact the "nyah" from HP's news. The San Francisco Chronicle resting outside my door on Wednesday ran a nice-sized story on the HP/Lucasfilm win on the front page of the business section, but the story, which included quotes from analysts, made no mention that the workstations were built on AMD's dual-core Opteron. Did the Chronicle fail to ask, did the analysts fail to mention it, or did someone decide that the Chronicle's readers wouldn't care?
For its part, HP thought that AMD was important enough to plant its CPU's moniker two paragraphs above the workstation's own in its press release. The release touts, in order, Lucasfilm, AMD Opteron, HP xw9300. I seriously doubt that HP demanded 1,000 free Opterons this time around.
In other news, HP's deposed chief Carly Fiorina has signed a deal for a new tell-all book due out next year. I wonder if she'll mention AMD, which I'm told she championed at some cost˜. Sun's promising Galaxy dual-core Opteron servers, whose "confidential" PDF presentation dropped its towel for long enough to give the whole world an eyeful, are due out in 3...2...1... Will coincidences never cease?
Posted by Tom Yager on August 26, 2005 05:28 PM
