Phil (phil@phil.com) on 2/6/09 wrote:
---------------------------
>savantu (savantu@email.ro) on 2/6/09 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>Phil (phdny@mac.com) on 2/6/09 wrote:
>>---------------------------
>>
>>>"with Itanium sales having exceeded SPARC sales last year " - Excuse me? Did you
>>>drink the coolaid from Intel or HP on Itanium vs SPARC sales?-check your facts before
>>>making clueless statements. Last time I checked (IDC Q1-Q3CY08), Sun SPARC volumes
>>>exceeded Itanium sales by over 4x (13,802 vs 48,585 servers) and SPARC revenue exceeded
>>>Itanium-just look at Sun's CMT sales alone @ over $1BN-surpassing Itanium. Clearly,
>>>Itanium volumes will continue to hurt ISV ROI investments and with Nehalem scaling
>>>upwards, how can Itanium survive without any volume? Sounds like a similar fate as Alpha...
>>>
>>
>>I'm talking about revenue, not units. SUN was still shipping large amounts of small servers.
>>
>>Itanium sales are [b] above $1B[/b] per Q and IIRC it surpassed SPARC worlwide at the end of o8.
>
>Last quarter of data available from IDC is Q3CY08 as far as I know and IDC is showing
>$1.219M for Itanium and $1.233M for SPARC so I'm not sure where you are getting
>your data from. And yes, Itanium is high in revenue (and close to SPARC) but unfortunately,
>this isn't a good indicator of "Sales" as it was labeled. Sales usually means how
>many units sold, not how much money you can charge your customers for 4x fewer systems.
>Without volume, you become a niche player and eventually get squeezed out of the market.
>

Can you access and post IPF, Sparc and Power figures for Q4 now ? As regards IPF's future, while HP continues to use it exclusively as its large enterprise server chip, its future is safe. That really is the bottom line. Performance vs x86 is and has been irrelevant, what will make more difference to IPF sales now is relative performance of Tukwila and Poulson vs older generations of Itanium/Alpha/PA-Risc. 1.1 GHz PA-Riscs were still being sold last year in fair quantity which shows that HP like Sun is getting a Mainframe effect with its Unix processors. Tried Montvale and found it 2-3 times faster than PA-8800 and looking forward to either Tukwila/Poulson as our replacement within the next 2 years.