Joe, Think of x86 market as ever rising sea level, with occasional tsunami. Non x86 architectures keep retreating to ever higher ground to stay out of the way. It's hard to see this as a winning strategy. Itanium is following this path, in the past travelled by MIPS, Alpha, Sparc, PA-RISC...
I've said in the past that Itanium has become the next Alpha, especially now that former Alpha engineers are working on next-generation Itanium designs. No matter how much Intel tries to position Itanium vs. existing RISC like SPARC and POWER, the real threat will indeed be Xeon and Opteron.
On the other hand, the "heat barrier" is going to affect servers in the near future, just as it's affecting desktops and notebooks today. That means a move back to lower-clocked, higher-IPC designs. Theoretically, that's where Itanium should excel, even though current Itaniums aren't exactly power-misers.
Tenchu
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
