Room - I think YOU are the one missing the bigger picture. Itanium per se, even if successful, would not have any particular effect on Sun, since Sun's 64 bit 'advantage' has not bought Sun any competitive advantage in the past. Intel has already done sufficient damage with Xeon.
The Intel 'ship' is surely in motion, and has been for years, on Itanium. There is unfortunately no way for Intel to get around the base problem with the chip - it has lackluster performance except in a few arcane areas, it is completely incompatible with any pool of existing applications, and at best it will finally give Intel some legitimacy in high end machines courtesy of HP and Unisys.
My fearless prediction is that Intel will 're-position' Itanium within the next 12 months, and at the same time offer an AMD-like product for the volume market. Intel has a lot of muscle, and they will probably pull that off, but not without a little blood in the streets. In the mean time, AMD has already accomplished their goal of the last 10 years, which is to break into the commercial server space. IBM is not going to cave into Intel, nor will Sun.
Intel is also WAAAY too savvy to 'squash AMD like a bug'. They did their best to keep AMD in the low end consumer box. They have lost that battle. But they can still keep AMD from eating into Intel's revenue in a serious way, and I expect they will do that with appropriate offerings. |
