TWY, Re: "I thought we were discussing various issues of POWER4 vs Itanium/McKinley. I NEVER once mentioned Xeon x86 anywhere in the discussion. Now you start in with Xeon x86. It seems you change the subject at will. You are a piece of work."
Try to pay attention. It's not too hard. I gave the 900MHz Xeon as an example for what IBM is selling an Intel chip for, and compared it to what they are selling their own processors for. If you want, take what I said and remove the word "Xeon" and replace it with "Itanium". The point still stands. IBM has several processor lines that they research and develop. If Itanium replaces at least one, that will be an enormous money maker for IBM.
Let's say MPR is correct, and it costs IBM $2500 to make a Power4 module, which they then sell for $100,000. That would be great to have a $97,500 profit on each module, but how many do you think they will sell per quarter? 1000? 2000? Not that it matters, since you also have to include the cost to design, debug, and develop the chip. Meanwhile, IBM will probably get a few thousand dollars of profit on each Itanium chip they sell. But a couple of years from now, Itanium will be selling orders of magnitude more than Power4 is selling, so it makes sense for them to carry that product line. And it isn't even the money they make on the processor itself, it's the margins they make on the entire Itanium system, whose volumes will be more of a money maker for IBM than any other of their processor lines. It doesn't matter that the margins per processor are much smaller. Yet when I confront you with this, you accuse me of changing subjects. I am not dodging the truth. You are.
And you have some nerve of accusing me of changing the subject, anyway. If I recall, you previously responded to my post to Win Smith by changing the subject of the conversation, and that's what started this whole debate. I am merely getting the conversation back on topic.
Message 16304628
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