wbmw,
If Sledgehammer sells for half of that, then they cumulatively save $2400 on 4 processors, and maybe another $400 on the cost of the platform. Add 20% to that to make up for the difference in margin on the server and you get a cost savings of $3360. Seems like a good savings, but that still puts the price of the 4-way server at $36.6k, so the overall savings are about 8.5% (and this is with Sledgehammer at 1/2 the price of the lowest grade Itanium 2).
I don't think Sledgehammer will be in $40,000 servers anytime soon or ever. I see Sledgehammer in low end 1 to 2-way servers, selling for $100 to $5,000, sith CPU prices initially between $500 and $1,000, later on falling to $200 to $500. For Itanium to be successful, it has to be competitive in this segment, to gain critical mass.
$40,000 and higher price server segment is a shrinking niche, and everything that applise to this segment will be soon rendered irrelevant, as the x86 processors overrun the last lines of defense of these dying vendors, overrunning them without breaking any sweat.
This niche was shrinking very fast, vendors disappearing one after another, and the dotcom boom temporarily slowed down the inevitable. Companies with funny money way over-speced, way overpaid for these dinosaurs, temporarily lifting Sun, as the last star of this dying galaxy.
There are ways to achieve performance and reliability with standard x86 servers at fraction of prices, and with IT budgets under increasing scrutiny, it will he bard to slip in over-priced over-speced systems.
As far as RISC software vendors not rewriting to x86, those who did not are mostly dead, and those who think they can survive by not rewriting to x86, but for another niche CPU - IA64 will soon be out of business too.
Joe |
