Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Haddock]

IBM expects most customers to pay about $38,000 for a setup that includes two 1GHz Itanium 2 processors, each with 3MB of high-speed cache memory.

This is the system that scores 1230 on SPECwebssl vs. 1783 for the Opteron 244. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_572_863%5E8800~69693,00.html
or 1700 for the Opteron 240

It's also the CPU that gets trounced here in SPECint:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_572_863%5E8800~69691,00.html

IBM initially will sell the system not for general use but rather for certain programs such as housing large databases or extracting useful information from sales data

Probably a good idea. Find some apps that need 3Mbytes of L2, otherwise it's not really competitive.