Why aren't the likes of Dell & HP competing in the Threadripper space?

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

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I find it interesting that the top tier of PC manufacturers simply aren't competing in this space. I expect the likes of OCUK are making money hand over fist.

There must be a reason.
 
The volume of sales that HPE and Dell do compared to someome like OcUK is enormous.
They also typically get volume discounts from Intel and buy their inventory way in advance.

Dell have used AMD processors in the past, but considering the market for 32core and 64core workstations is really tiny, its probably not worth them investing in it.

In the time it took to write this post they probably sold a few thousand units.
 
Quartz said:
I find it interesting that the top tier of PC manufacturers simply aren't competing in this space. I expect the likes of OCUK are making money hand over fist.

There must be a reason.
Click to expand...

Threadripper is for workstations and high-level productivity tasks. Dell and HP are mostly selling machines for offices and home users.

The workstations they do build are generally for big companies who aren't paying close attention to whether they're getting the ideal setup: they just want something that works with a Dell/HP warranty behind it. Beyond that they couldn't give a toss

People buying threadripper are mostly small high-tech businesses and enthusiasts... who will just build their own or buy one or two machines from somewhere like OcUK or it's competitors
 
It's more business to business sales. So, imagine your typical corporate infrastructure department. Couldn't give a crap about actual performance. When you're buying 200 PCs for an office every other month, all you really care about is price and ease of setup. Oh, and how good the yearly Dell sponsored 'business event' (**** up) is.
 
The market will be far too small for them, I think thats their main issue. Even if there is a big enough market, most people who've even heard of threadripper are enthusiasts who will most likely just go for their own build instead of buying a ready made machine from Dell or HP or whatever.
 
Intel pay them to use their chips, it's not something they can quickly change due to supply chains, HP and Dell have both started offering AMD across their products but no where near the amount of Intel.
 
A big part of the problem with workstations is that software companies validate their software on a limited number of platforms with quite specific hardware. Deviate from their specific hardware and software requirements and you invalidate your support contract and they won't support you when things go wrong. For example, we use Avid media composer which is validated on intel xeon's with mainly nvidia quadro cards and the odd AMD radeon pro WX card. There are zero amd cpu options. Heck they are that prescriptive, you have to have add in cards in specific motherboard slots, specific bios and driver versions, even specific bios options.

This is the same story across many software vendors when dealing with commercial support contracts.
 
We have come across this with Catia. It works fine on Workstations that we sell but not certified. Certification normally takes 3-6 months and I believe, at last enquiry, was about £50k per BOM. BOM have to be VERY specific and any deviation can negate certification and mean a re-certification fee(or BOM revision certification which may not be as costly). So the companies that sell certified Workstations for Catia are only the companies that can build a stack of systems to a specific BOM, have them certified and keep them for X years and hence why they tend to be horrendously expensive.
 
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