Re: the same Itanium system will be far cheaper than a similarly-configured UltraSPARC or PA-RISC or Alpha system. Itanium is SHV. The others are not.
Wrong. Itanium may or may not someday be SHV, for the time being it is an expensive, experimental architecture being evaluated widely, but actually used almost never. It is going to be a long time before it is SHV.
A SUN Enterprise 5s server with its proven 64-bit processor and including the most proven 64-bit operating system in the world with unlimited client access user licenses (compare that to Windows XP server when it's commercially released) is $1,995.
store.sun.com
Here's the cheapest Itanium I could find:
The PowerEdge 7150 delivers the performance of 64-bit computing with Intel® Itanium™ processors and leverages the strengths of Dell's direct model to deliver affordable enterprise class solutions. It's $19,175 - almost 10 times as much!
configure.us.dell.com
The Dell comes with Red Hat Linux (a nice OS, but in terms of enterprise quality service and support, ease of management, etc. not even close to Solaris). It has an 18 gig hard drive (the SUN has a 20 gig hard drive). The Dell can't be ordered with less than 1 gig of RAM. To bring the SUN up to 1 gig or RAM is an extra $650.
The entry level Itanium is almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the entry level SUN because the Itanium isn't an SHV machine, while the SUN is.
Some time during the next year AMD will have shipped 1 million X86-64 hammers (mostly for desktops, and at an ASP that may not be above $200) - but it will be SHV platform, and it will run any current software while "future proofing" your investment with a 64-bit capability. When will Intel have shipped 1 million IA-64 machines?
Remember, the dot com crash has taken out a lot of the web development companies. A lot of sites are running code and objects that isn't going to be rewritten for IA-64 anytime soon. And the Pentium 100 performance available from interpreted code on Itanium won't cut it if a new server is needed at all. At the same time, companies don't want to be stuck with a 32-bit server in a 64-bit world. The solution for some companies will be the hammer series. |
