Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[bobs10]

Huh? The primary competition for IPF in the HPC market is
POWER in the SMP and capability segments and x86 in the
low cost cluster and capacity segments. Cray barely registers
on the radar at all and then mainly for its vector gear.

Me...

Yeah, INTC is selling tons of Itaniums and the Cray market is just too small to go after. Really, well that market is not too small for CRAY/AMD, and then there's all that cachet attached to the highest end super conputers.

There was a time when the X86 server market only consisted of SMP and low cost clusters, but Cray among others, continues to extend upward the boundaries in which linked AMD64 machines can play. Granted, the Cray machines are very specialized, but the point you keep missing is that the market is sick of proprietary solutions and wants AMD64 based server products. All these legacy big-iron machines are going to be replaced and it doesn't look like Itanium is what is doing the replacing.

Hardly a week goes by where there isn't an article disparaging Itanium sales. And now we're starting to see articles saying even the programming community is redirecting its' efforts from Itanium to where the volume is. Then to make things even worse analysts are starting to say AMD may have as much as 20% of the server (X86) markets next year.

Personally I think too much damage has been done to the Itanium name for it to ever recover, no matter how good the new machines are. And then there's the Xeons which can't even play in the same yard because the Opteron bully kicks the crap out of them every time they meet.

Next year the server market is not going to kind to INTC.