morrowinder,
The bulk of the Itanium market is not in the same price band as the Opteron market
Duh! Isn't that the point of what I was making? To show any advantage over Opteron, Itanium must be paired with expensive chipset in an expensive system from HP or SGI. In the price ranges where Itanium can get closer to Itanium (using Intel chipset) all performance advantages are lost.
BTW, I am not sure why you are talking about Sun vs. the rest of Opteron vendors in your post. You can get the same results on any system as Sun got, since all the performance critical stuff is in the processor in Opteron systems.
Maybe SUN can carry AMD with their brand and reputation and gain some market share but they have been selling Intel based servers for a while without much success. Is Opteron THAT much different?
It is better than current Xeons. Also, this time, Sun is serious about selling into x86 market.
They still have to compete with HP and IBM AMD skus as well, who are more respected in the x86 market. The playing field is not level. SUN is simply not very successful as an x86 vendor.
I am an AMD shareholder, not Sun shareholder. I don't really care who sells more Opterons.
And Itanium is awfully competitive with a fairly old part:) A year from now will SUN look as bad as they do today? Do you really believe AMD will save them?
Sun will have to save itself. They picked a pretty good horse (Opteron), but their time to market has been poor so far, and offerings not exactly distinguishable from competition (IBM, HP). HP is not sleeping, and may continue to be one step ahead of Sun in Opteron market.
Joe
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