chipguy,
It does appear as if your argument is stuck in time. You continue to tout MS on Itanium as some sort of long-term advantage the Itanium will enjoy over MS.
To the contrary, AMD will be breaking into entirely new markets (for AMD) as more and more software and hardware support comes on line for Opteron.
What new markets does Itanium get to move into, that are not already occupied by Opteron which has a large cost advantage?
What do you think the impact of a Serverworks chipset that enables 64-way Opteron systems with massive interconnect bandwidth will be on a company like SGI?
Sure, your argument will appear to hold water for a time... The Itanium will be happily "competing" in some markets that it has all to itself, and it will look really good for Itanium. Then one day, Opteron will show up. No, I don't claim that it will just suddenly steal the whole market and shut Itanium out.
It will just take a peice of it.
Hey, Itanium might even penetrate downwards as well to some degree, but the Opteron is moving up into higher-margin spaces, while the Itanium's margins will face downward pressure.
All I can say is that if Intel pooh-pooh's x86 like you are (it even sounds ridiculous just to write it) they are going to suffer, bigtime. Fortunately for Intel it appears that they are not as narrow-minded as your posts mamke you sound.
fpg
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
