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John, Re: "I won't tell you that we haven't had those discussions" to drop Power and go with Itanium, said Robert Amezcua, pSeries vice president at IBM. "We looked hard at the future roadmaps, and we believe strongly that we have the answer in Power technology. The (IBM) xSeries team has an Itanium box, and we are out to make sure Itanium doesn't survive."

I've heard of the corporate competition that the IBM culture has within their divisions. IBM's pSeries servers are very attractive, and IBM would have to have a lot of demand for Itanium over Power to make the move away from their core technology. Even so, I would take this as a good sign, since it shows that while IBM believes in Power, but isn't completely abject to the idea of using Itanium in the future. It may eventually depend on whether IBM can execute to their plans. Power5 contains multithreading, which is a very complex feature to add. If IBM slips with this technology, Itanium 2 can easily end up overtaking Power in performance, making a whole different set of circumstances. IBM may yet change their mind in the future.

Re: Always thickening the plot, IBM may also throw another lower-end system into the mix by adding a server based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor, Arimilli said. Arimilli claims that once Power5 arrives, it will be IBM's answer for low-end 64-bit computing.

"If Opteron takes off, we will be there, and we will OEM it," Arimilli said. "I think it's a pretty good story for 2003, but it won't be the story in 2004 when Power5 arrives."

I don't know why IBM sees Opteron has having any kind of 64-bit story in 2003. Maybe this is a tacit disclosure that IBM will be ready with 64-bit Linux and DB2 this year. Keep in mind that "low end" to IBM still makes for a high end server to everybody else. It may depend on when 4-way Opteron becomes available in designs that IBM can OEM. Knowing IBM to be an agnostic kind of company, I can see them trying Opteron out for a little while to test market acceptance, even while strongly pushing Itanium within a separate division. Only at IBM.