...and will use "Opteron"-Chips from AMD. They have started to buy them already. AMD is going up in the stock market now.
Wow, that's a lot of Opterons. AMD is really doing good these days. Just wait when Dell announces they're gonna start selling servers with Opterons.
I wonder if it's a vote of confidence for AMD, or they're selling the chips at a loss so they can say "Google chose us!". I personally use AMD chips, but mostly because they're quite a bit cheaper.
Well, I think Opterons just perform better than Xeons and Google's just choosing what's better. There's been a lot of talk about customers telling Dell that they won't buy from them unless they sell servers with Opterons in them.
You know, Intel has a floating point problem... Here's an Intel White Paper on the subject. Note the dates at the bottom of the page. Makes you wonder. That is a hell of a change, logistically. Due to the expense of the manpower alone, you would have to justify that to Eric, Larry, and Sergy. Edit: Here's more good links, and some great links out: http://www.cygnus-software.com/papers/x86andinfinity.html http://komarix.org/per/computers/RobustCholeskyPerf
I do wonder what this might have to do with all the Google bugs I've been seeing, and if it is because of the change, or I am correct about the floating point problem being the reason. Does anyone know if they have started already, and if perhaps these are the 'infrastructure changes' that Matt Cutts discussed about BigDaddy?
Do AMD and Intel share the same socket nowadays? Surely they can't just swap processor without mobo's and all that...
I wonder if there is any corporate political reasoning behind this move. With Intel entering the Mac space and Microsoft always somewhere in the mix, perhaps G are trying to forge relationships outside of Microsoft spheres of influence (might be alot harder than just changing processor platform). Could of course just be some great salesman has scored a cracking deal!
Are those 200.000 true or just a guess ? If you go to articles describing Google you will find that the number should be very lower
The way it looks, they are not going out and replacing all those chips, etc. but purchasing for immediate need. Mercury News also states this, I guess I missed that. There is some talk of Google using shipping container type enclosures that can be dropped into an area and connected up, ready to go d/c's, if you will. AMD has superior heat dispersion, and this alone could explain the change. I did not know that Paul Otellini sat on Google's board. I am sure this desicion was not easy. We'll have to watch the news for his name now. This article I found is also interesting. Mentions the Big 3 engines: http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/id;30994533;fp;8;fpid;0
I don't get $1.40 to $40.07 that day.. http://www.google.com/search?oi=stock&q=stocks:AMD&prev=/search?q=AMD&hl=en&lr=
I don't think I am understanding what you are getting at, gabs. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=AMD Nice, steady climb from January 1. This news broke 3/2/2006, seems perfectly in line with everything else. Bigger dumps and jumps in mid-February. BTW, you can break the frame on Google by clicking on the upper right corner, if you were trying to show us something else. Did you expect a big jump? Google is not purchasing these all at once, they are going with AMD for "near-term server purchases". The title of this thread is kind of misleading, and I did not catch that they are not purchasing and replacing 200,000 chips all at once when first reading the article on Mercury News.
Definitely sounds like good PR for AMD but I don't think Google is going to go replacing all their servers anytime soon. Part of their model is to use lots and lots of cheap servers instead of consolidating power on high end systems.
I thought google was very secretive about their servers. How many they have, where they are, etc. In fact, wasn't that one of their arguments against releasing their search records to the government? That it would reveal too much information about their servers to the competition?