wbmw, I don't think AMD64 has an advantage in the high end server market. As systems get larger, the price of the processors becomes a smaller percentage of the overall cost. The rest of the cost is built into functionality that can decrease the time between failures and decrease the time to fix failures. Itanium architecture and the supporting chipsets have much higher levels of RAS than Opteron, and performance is better in most cases. The Itanium ramp will start here. .
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.In the end, people always want bang for the buck. They don't care whether it's x86 or not.
Could be why google runs on ~ 15,000 PCs. One fails they don't bother to replace it. Not 'cost effective'. It's the trend. Buy the cheapest *STUFF* that'll run the software, put in redundancy and walk away. When 1/2 the farm gets obsolete scrape it out with a front loader and start over.
It's why, IMO, Itanium's chasing an obsolete methodology. People cared about all that *JUNK*(RAS/MTBF/etc.) 10 years ago when the architecture of Itanium was being designed. (10 years ago I paid almost $1,000 for a 1G SCSI drive for my home PC. I *CARED* back then if a drive failed.) Building redundancy and not caring is the way of the future.
JIMO.
8-/
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