Even if you decide this year that Itanium is not the preferred architecture, you cannot start changing anyhow. You just dragged your customer base through a wrenching conversion to Itanium (from PA-RISC, Alpha and mips), losing many customers to Power (IBM). Making a move away from Itanium would effectively drive the rest of your customers into the waiting arms of IBM.
I agree totally with this analysis. One of the biggest
millstones around Alpha's neck early on was that DEC
had just switched its workstation customers from VAX
to MIPS when it knew Alpha would soon be coming out.
Big mistake.
Another thing you are forgetting - why is HP using Opteron? Not to replace Itanium, I assure you, but to protect it. It is not in HP's interest for Itanium to become a commodity architecture. Rather, it is in their interest to keep Itanium high end & exclusive, charging lots of money for these systems. Moving the Xeon market to Itanium is the last thing that HP needs, so they need an answer for that market. That answer is Opteron.
I've been posting that position since last April. I consistantly said that it would be in HP's interest to adopt Opteron, just as soon as the production can support it, to protect their Itanium position. This view was disliked by both Intel and AMD fans - the Intel fans thought that HP would want to migrate Itanium everywhere, the AMD fans thought that using Opteron to protect Itanium margins was strange, to say the least.
Your argument does have merit in helping to explain HP's
recent moves. IMO it's also extensible to help explain Intel's
strategy in coming out with IA-32e. Obviously Intel doesn't
want to lose those Xeon customers who want to move to 64
bit computing slowly, one application at a time. But it also
doesn't want to get into a price war with Opteron with its
high margin IPF big iron chips. In a way IA-32e can be seen
as its Celeron strategy for 64 bit computing - a form of
product segmentation. Intel can gradually price bomb Xeon64
as increasing IPF sales takes up Xeon's former role of
grabbing high margin and profits in the server market.
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