>Non HP players are NEC,Hitachi and Fujitsu. These behemoths have global reach and
>although they started slow, Itanium is becoming their de facto high end chip. Fujitsu
>still builds Sparc CPUs, given the diminishing returns this won't last forever.In
>fact, if they were smart they would acquire a QPI license and transition SPARC to
>IPF servers. ( like HP did for PA-RISC in order to ease transition and costs )
>

there is also a strategic dimension of intel already being a quasi-monopolist with x86 and some ppl (including me) are getting nervous if they would own the ras-unix market too.

while not dynamically growing that market is big and the attrition through x86 is much slower than many people have predicted. it will take at least another 5-10 years if at all until x86 will be viable for truly mission critical & large scale financial/data-warehousing computing. 5 years of plenty of money to be made.

but more importantly in these 5 years it will be determined which architectures survive. itanium is slowly growing, power is stable, sparc is surprisingly stable but everybody is waiting for rock (and niagara 3) to drop this fall.

it seems like it's make or break for that uarch and it will be a really interesting year with tukwila coming, two new sparc chips and possibly ibm cranking up the pr-machine on power7.

on a sidenote: don't forget that governments are on the brink to drop big bucks in cyber-infrastructure, not least the big pki's in the sky that will give us digital identities soon. lot's and lot's of legalities connected with this not least extremely high demands for availability and traceability. you won't see to many x86 boxen in these data-centers for years to come.

ibm has a big chunk of this market in europe, but there is already talk about having a diverse eco-system. power and sparc are much more open architectures than itanium and that is a big asset in these decisions.

my prediction is that sparc won't go away so easy and so soon.