Computer buyers becoming risk averse

Corporate buyers are sticking as much as possible to known systems to avoid having to try new technological approaches that may fail according to some systems builders. The resulting decisions are most likely to be around using existing expertise rather than investing in unknown systems.

“Risk aversion is key to the buying decision,” George Reitz, vice president of sales for Rackable Systems told vnunet.com.

“Buying criteria has changed from the past where it was pure price to performance. Now everyone looks at the risk aversion angle.”

AMD are hoping this attitude will make its much more attractive to buyers and system builders. The 45nm Shanghai can be swapped with the existing Barcelona server processors with nothing more than a BIOS change.

“The elephant in the room at the moment is the economy,” Burke Banda, AMD’s US marketing manager for servers and workstations told vnunet.com.

“It’s one of the most telling pieces of feedback we’re getting back is on infrastructure. It’s time for them to be risk averse by sticking to technology they are familiar with.”

System builders have also said that retaining socket compatibility is helping them maintain control over inventory. Philip Pokorny, chief architect of Linux high performance computing (HPC) system builders Penguin Computing told vnunet.com that he was very positive about the new chip.

“So I have a stock of motherboards that I’ve been using for Barcelona,” he said.

“I can make those motherboards Shanghai-capable very easily and continue shipping them.”

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