mas,
With the cancellation of Alpha and release of McKinley he shifted alliances as he does not like the x86 ISA and enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.
I guess it must be painful watching x86 take 100% of workstation business, and now crossing the magical 50% of the server market in terms of dollars. In terms of units it must be 90% or more, I guess.
What I wonder is how quickly the remaining 50% will fall. I think rather quickly. I think the key feature is 64 bitness. It eliminates the last tangible advantage the overpriced RISC system can claim as justification of the high price. Plentiful memory and I/O bandwidth are here already in form of Opteron, the memory capacity is almost there, but will become a non issue with FB-DIMM, and all that needs to be done is software transition to catch up with hardware.
The RAS FUD will start to lose its potency as well as clusteres of redundant inexpenive machine exceed the theoretical availability statistics of the most expensive RISC systems match or exceed performance, and be more competitive price-wise.
Time to invent some blue crystals...
Joe
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