Not another Intel vs. AMD Debate!? (This Time, It's About Video) - If it ain't Broke...
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System manufacturers have a hard enough time with the fast pace of technology change without having to constantly update their knowledge on what is compatible with what, which parts don't like which other parts, and what software ties in with all of that. When they find combinations that work, they stick to them. For an $800 system, if the PC builder finds that graphics card "x" doesn't work with motherboard "y" he can, at a push, throw the $20 card away and buy another one that does work. But when you are talking professional graphics cards costing $1,000+, dual Xeon server boards costing similar amounts, and a DVS Mado, or a Leitch VelocityHD ($10,000), suddenly throwing away isn't an option anymore. Fortunately, products like the DM2 in SGI's $250,000 Octane are restricted to SG workstations, and not a lot of clients ask for the Farmer's WIFE (electronicfarm.com), circa $100,000.
Experienced solution providers will swear that there is a much better chance of everything working smoothly if the machine is Intel based. But, more importantly, their clients demand it. Intel has been around in this market since the year dot. Clients already have extensive Intel based equipment, they have servers, rack-mounted servers, banks of 5U server chassis over 5U server chassis housing all manner of devices from dual and quad processor systems to controls, switches, storage and backup devices, all in the industry standard 19" racks. This type of equipment is core Intel territory. (Okay, so Sun Microsystems has built more than the odd server here and there. And of course, then there 
are the super computers used mainly for research applications... but we digress). Clients also have engineers and other staff trained on the Intel equipment. And that's a boat they don't want to rock.
AMD has never had a presence in this market. AMD originally built processors for the gamers and the cost conscious customers. That was the company's core (and only) market. AMD CPUs were fairly cheap offerings and were not marketed as having server level reliability. AMD had nothing for the server market until quite recently. Sure, Poweroid built the UK's first AMD dual processor system [review] in 2001. Professional video, though, kinda pre-dates 2001. It wasn't till mid 2003 that AMD launched the Opteron processor, the first AMD CPU that could be used in quad-processor and eight processor systems. In 2004, at the time of writing this article, you still needed to go down the Intel route if you needed any more than 8 processors in your system. So, if you choose the AMD route for your servers you'd soon hit a buffer with no clear path to expansion.
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