Re: The server market is $60B currently and growing at 14%/yr.
First of all, recent server growth numbers were skewed higher by a combination of Y2K and the dot com bubble - now we're sliding down from that peak.
Second, the reason DEC, IBM, SUN, etc. aren't dominating the information industry anymore is that each year the proportion of "servers" that are just PC's in different boxes gets larger.
Third, when IBM gets $30 Billion in revenue from servers, it's something like $20 Billion in support contracts, $5 billion in software, and $5 Billion in hardware of which $2 billion is processors sold at a very high markup (to IBM) leaving about $0.7 Billion out of $30 for whoever makes the CPUs (mostly IBM for RS6000s, S390s, and AS400s). Go look at IBM's development tools page sometime. Almost none of their tools don't run on Intel processors! It's really quite amazing.
www-4.ibm.com
The notion that there is some huge number of buyers anxious to buy millions of SHV server CPUs at $2,000 each sounds great, but is very far away from reality.
It remains a lovely fantasy. |
