Vincent Diepeveen (diep@xs4all.nl) on 2/5/09 wrote:
---------------------------

>
>Excuse me?
>
>When was the last time you ordered hardware?
>What price would you want to pay for Tukwila versus Nehalem?
>
>>It is a problem however if money goes to Sparc/Power even if Nehalem
>>has 2x the performance per socket and per thread.Sometimes that isn't enough and
>>that's where the whole Itanium philosophy comes into play.
>
>Software gets upgraded in lots of companies. All kind of software from the past
>already has been replaced long time ago. All that software already scales pretty
>ok. It is NO problem to let single socket or dual socket machines do the job, as long as they got ECC.
>
>Very few softwareproducts can profit major league from 4 socket machines over 2 socket machines, pricewise seen.
>
>Basically we're speaking about AI engines such as my chessprogram where a 4 socket box is real cool to have.
>
>Note for 2009 even that isn't relevant much, as some total idiots decided single
>handed to have a 8 core (logical cores) limit there.
>
>Yet there is a lot of other tournaments out there. Thing is, that is software that
>doesn't run crucial services for companies now.
>
>Vincent
>
>

By the same logic SPARC sales would be 0. Yet, according to a friend from Siemens, all serious SAP installations they do are on SPARC.
Explain that.

Tukwilla doesn't need to beat x86 ; it needs to beat Power and SPARC to be as a real cash cow for Intel.They're half way through this , with Itanium sales having exceeded SPARC sales last year.
The obvious problem is that HP benefits the most from this and Intel should take steps to improve the situation of other IPF vendors , mainly Fujitsu and NEC.
Of course, the golden goose would be IBM. :)