someone (someone@somewhere.com) on 2/6/09 wrote:
>
>IDC says the average Itanium system sold for HPC in 2007
>had 7 processors and was priced at $8966 per processor.
>That means 150,000 processors shipped just for HPC and
>HPC was less than a third of IPF sales in 2007. IPF sales
>in each of Q1, Q2, and Q3 2008 were higher YoY according
>to public IDC and HP statements and I doubt system price
>per processor went up *at all* in 2008 let alone by a big
>factor.
>
>Your implied claim of an average of 4.1 processors per
>Itanium system can't pass a basic sniff test.

I think it does.

In fact, it's even easily explained: one counts processors
as "cores", and another counts processors as "sockets".

I would expect that most of the Itaniums sold would be
dual-core. And suddenly the numbers don't look all that
different any more. The 150k "processors" in 2007 were
just 70k sockets, and if that's a third of the whole, then
you had 200k sockets for the whole year.

Then, the 2008 numbers say 160k sockets for the first
three quarters. Looks like the same number, doesn't it?
Certainly gives room for a slight single-digit increase
too.

And the 7-vs-4.1 is the same thing. An average of seven
cores doesn't sound totally unlikely. In contrast,
averaging 7 sockets sounds ludicrous. Sure, there are big
machines, but the bulk of Itanium must still be quad socket,
with probably a healthy sprinkling of duals.

As to the $9k/core price, that just means that the hardware
would be in the $70k range for a 4-socket IPF machine. I
can't make hp.com give me a quote, but that doesn't sound
too odd. But Intel won't be getting anything like that.
They'll get $1.5k per socket or whatever.

So I think your numbers line up fine, without looking any
deeper at them.

Linus