Chipguy, re: That is pure BS. The closest thing to the captive system replacement sales you imply is IPF sales to run HP-UX and VMS. That represented less than half of IPF sales in Q3. The majority of IPF sales are on Windows and Linux which can't be considered captive in any way.
Sorry chipguy, I did not mean to say that. I said IPF is only replacing Alpha, PA-RISC, and SGI/FS-MIPS architectures, and that combined group isn't growing much at all. Sure they take some wins away from Alpha/Power/x86, but Power/Alpha/x86 are taking wins away from IPF/Alpha/PA-RISC/high end MIPS too. The result is that IPF, Alpha, PA-RISC, high end MIPS as a group aren't growing.
LOL, from what I have seen IPF bashers have changed their
tune little from when IPF was selling in the range of $8m
a quarter four years ago to $619m a quarter now. I suspect
in 2 or 3 years when IPF systems are selling at >$2B/qtr
the same idiots would proclaim "itanic is dead" even if
Intel announced it was making over a $1B annual profits
from IPF MPU sales.
That is pure BS, as was your previous quote above. I NEVER EVER said that Montecito/Montvale were loosers. When McKinley came out I did not say it was a looser either. When Madison came out, idem dito. Now the same with Montecito. My previous post was in line with this as I said that even after the delay and elimination of Foxton that Montecito would still be "pretty good" (but not good enough to unseat Power; Sparc is more a question but customers buy Sparc for it's software and seem to have reasonable trust in SUN's roadmap so I think Montecito might not even win that much sales from SUN despite the performance delta). I did say between Merced and McKinley quite a couple of times that there were strong indications that it could eventually die (and there were; even Intel claimed it was only a development vehicle at the time). Between McKinley and Montecito Itanium has improved but not at an amazing rate. You simply have no basis to call me an 'IPF basher'.
Because your posts reflect a close to blind believe in Intel's Itanium projections they were rather very often overly optimistic on introduction dates, performance estimates, frequencies, features, etc... About everyone here knows that. You can blame Intel for that, but you can't blame me for questioning those past predictions (or future predictures for that matter).
The reason why I reacted to your post is because you really quite often claim very healthy growth rates for Itanium while not considering current growth was largely predestined because of the demise of Alpha, PA-RISC, high end MIPS and resulting agreements to transition those over to Itanium, mostly before it ever existed. The combined Alpha/PA-RISC/high end MIPS isn't growing much at all, and Itanium growth is not amazing ANYONE. It's only ok. It hasn't visibly taken any growth away from high end x86 either (also something I remember you projected would have long time ago have happened on RWT).
Please keep in mind it's only one part of this topic that I disagree with: As stated at least three times before over the years I liked your Opteron performance estimates prior to 2003 much better as they were much more spot on (@RWT). I continue to appreciate your IPF info as you know much more about it (especially but not exclusively the technical bits) than me. Really the only thing I don't like is posts that are imo not complete or overly optimistic when it comes to IPF prospective.
Regards,
Rink
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