Doug, Re: points
1. Fair enough.
2. You will also see continued progress in software optimization for Itanium 2. This is especially true since Intel is putting millions of dollars into Itanium 2 infrastructure, while AMD is relying on third parties to do most of the work for Opteron.
3. Itanium 2 max power is 130W. Opteron max power is 84.7W. It's straight from the datasheets.
4. Yes.
5. Itanium 2 is encroaching on markets that are very well established. Not only are these markets low volume, but they have an exceedingly high barrier for entry. Up until last week, Itanium 2 did not have a fully featured Microsoft operating system. Now it does, which will help. It is also only the fourth quarter after Itanium 2 first launched in Q3 2002. Software is just now becoming widely available, including SQL Server, Oracle, and others on the wings. It will be interesting to compare Q3 and Q4 2003 with Q3 and Q4 2002 (just so that seasonal differences don't play on the volumes). I'm expecting several percentage points of enterprise market share by the end of the year.