On paper, SledgeHammer may be competition for Itanium, high end Xeon, HP, IBM or Sun offerings, but it is a pipe dream that it will end up in those kind of configurations. The immediate goal is to make it to corporate desktop, workstation and low end 2-way servers. AMD should focus all the efforts there.
I'm sure IBM,CPQ,GTW, and HP all had a preview of Hammer and they all said no thanks. The also had a preview of Prestonia and McKinley and they made their choices. That must tell you something.
In my most optimistic moments (yeah yeah, dreaming), I think that Hammer could spawn a second-revolution in the PC industry. Just as the PC displaced the mainframe because it brought computing to the masses, I think Hammer has the potential to bring 64-bit computing to the masses, creating a way of easing them in by allowing them to leverage their existing software.
I can think of several additional things that could make this real - for example, some software to run multiple 32-bit Virtual Machines on a single 64-bit box - I am in the software biz, and it would improve my productivity tremendously if I could switch between my test environment and development environment quickly; or, if I could run a firewall-server, web-server, email-server, and productivity apps etc all in their own virtual machines on a single box, so I get rock-solid separation all in one box.
Itanium, due to its price-point and specialized software requirements, and due to having a fully funded brother in the PIV, may never reach that point.
Eventually, it could happen that 64-bit computing becomes the standard, and only AMD has a viable solution.
At 8.50 a pop, its worth taking that risk.
Milan |
