My pleasure. Qwik and I both feel that Intel will have great difficulties in fielding high-quality servers based on Italian, whoops, I mean Pentatium, no, Mercedium, hmm. The reason is that such as system is a three-headed monster: Intel (chips and motherboards), Dell/BurgerPaq/Joes Computer Systems cases, harddrive subsystems, and other misc. crap, and an operating system (Linux, NT, or Solaris). Who is responsible for the problem when the system just halts (as multi-processors systems tend to do when placed under heavy load in their early days).
Let's do some extrapolation: Suppose Intel do achieve first ship in August 2000. Then suppose Microsoft put out three or four service packs to Windows 2000, to make it stable. We're well into 2002 by this stage. Intel recall some motherboards in 2001, and finally fix the problem by 2002. That's almost three years away, and meanwhile servers have been crashing randomly, and causing major problems in the e-commerce they are supposed to be servicing.
Or, you can buy a system from Sun. Stable multi-processors for many years, an operating system that has been stable for years too (unlike NT), and one-stop-shopping when you need a problem fixed.
Which would you buy?
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