Tony - The Hitachi design, like the Unisys design, is essentially mainframe technology which happens to use an Intel processor. These designs fit a very narrow market niche and will sell in small volumes - hundreds at best.
Inclusion of Intel processors does not, in itself, put these systems in the cost range of volume products, since the support chipsets, cache and memory architecture, and I/O are all expensive proprietary designs. The Unisys ES7000, for instance, while cheaper than similar RISC designs, is still almost 3 times the cost of a volume based design.
Depending on how much effect the "special" designs have on software design, these systems may provide some proving ground for large system design, but I doubt that they will have any impact on either market share or revenue against either the big Unix vendors or the high end of Intel based volume products from companies like Compaq. Likewise, their performance will probably be less than current cluster designs, and certainly less than upcoming larger systems using volume components, and more standard architectures like infiniband. |
