Dual Processor Athalon for mainstream acceptance ? (Score 1)

Dual Processor AMD boards ??? Why is this a landmark step... First we have to examine the market for PC's. The traditional market for the big guys has been corporate and this means standardisation. Most corporate clients want single vendor contracts with discount (as if any corporate client pays the full price). The corporate IS management world is full of idiots who don't understand the technology but like the buzzwords. Unfortunately many of the 'managers' failed to understand the technology early on and have been sliding backwrds ever since. Since the Gartner Group report on TCO they have been given a nice report to show to upper management and say what they are doing about it. This means BUY INTEL, BUY COMPAQ or IBM and then try and make it all look complicated. Lucky for the IS managers the big suppliers are all to eager to support that they buy all the hardware from them and will supply reams of information about how this is cheaper for the company, even if they are paying 20-30% more for the same machine. This 'over standardisation' is noe getting to a point where the IS managers want not only single vendors but also single product ranges. Unless AMD are accepted by the big vendors and represented in the server market the corporate market will stay out of grasp. I have personally heard it explained to senior mangement that these 'toy' machines will crash the whole network if connected. AMD have aimed squarely at the single processor market, how many SMP servers are really in the market ? Unfortunately for AMD this is not really the issue and until decent Dual and even quad processor AMD machines are available from the big vendors the millions of machines that only ever run Office or email will stay is INTEL. This is a reality that AMD must live with, the server market may not be the volume they needed in the past but having got a reasonable share of the SOHO market they must address the issue if they want to get the big corporate cleints.