Well, the people demand polls, hope this one at least gets some interesting results...
Now that it has Intel's backing, it seems that x86-64/x86_64/AMD64 is the bonafide successor to IA32, and that we can safely assume that a few years down the road, IA32 will be effectively obsolete.
This seems to have lead to a lot of speculation (by primarily not-too-bright individuals) that x86-64 will become something of a universal industry standard, and that Opteron/Xeon 64 and its successors will slowly (i.e approximately a decade) find their way into the high end server space, replacing old enterprise computing standbys like SPARC, POWER, PA-RISC, and MIPS (and eventually dooming Itanium as well). The primary argument is that the initial outlay of commodity processors will remain low, but that they are already gaining features comparable to enterprise processors like SMT, hot swapability, MCE, larger caches, better memory management, and higher throughput, which will ultimately bring them to the same level of TCO as their enterprise counterparts.
We'll see... for now Opteron has relatively little backing by tier 1 vendors (i.e. Sun, IBM), who are only offering 1-2 processor single image systems (although IBM has a nice Opteron blade server offering). There's been announcements of enterprise caliber Opteron systems with 64 processors or more (by HP I believe? I don't have a URL offhand), but for now Opteron remains primarily a processor for the DIY crowd.
Personally I think Intel and HP will see their investments into Itanium through until the end, that HP will continue to slowly retire their PA-RISC and AlphaServer lines while coaxing their existing customer base onto IA64. Furthermore, I see HP buying SGI sometime in the near future... SGI has some excellent IP and seems to be ahead of everyone, with the possible exception of IBM, in the race to make Linux enterprise-worthy, and most of all, SGI has been a wholehearted adopter of IA64 (they still continue to develop MIPS, but not too terribly actively) Ultimately, I see HP overtaking Sun permanently in the server market, and pushing Linux/HP-UX on IA64.
I also forsee increased collaboration between Sun and Fujitsu, with technologies from UltraSPARC and SPARC64 eventually merging into a line of collaboratively developed, massively SMT processors. IBM is doing much the same thing with Power5, which will support 4 hardware threads, and with such advanced fabrication plants as its Fishkill plant I expect they'll remain the leader in fabrication technologies, at least for the near future.
That's just me attempting to peer into my crystal ball... ultimately my vote goes to Itanium... the current issues with inadequate compilers will slowly resolve themselves, and Intel and HP are in so deep already that they want to make up their losses by seeing it through to the end, rather than being bound to what are, in their eyes, inferior architectures (i.e. x86-64 for Intel, PA-RISC for HP)
Now that it has Intel's backing, it seems that x86-64/x86_64/AMD64 is the bonafide successor to IA32, and that we can safely assume that a few years down the road, IA32 will be effectively obsolete.
This seems to have lead to a lot of speculation (by primarily not-too-bright individuals) that x86-64 will become something of a universal industry standard, and that Opteron/Xeon 64 and its successors will slowly (i.e approximately a decade) find their way into the high end server space, replacing old enterprise computing standbys like SPARC, POWER, PA-RISC, and MIPS (and eventually dooming Itanium as well). The primary argument is that the initial outlay of commodity processors will remain low, but that they are already gaining features comparable to enterprise processors like SMT, hot swapability, MCE, larger caches, better memory management, and higher throughput, which will ultimately bring them to the same level of TCO as their enterprise counterparts.
We'll see... for now Opteron has relatively little backing by tier 1 vendors (i.e. Sun, IBM), who are only offering 1-2 processor single image systems (although IBM has a nice Opteron blade server offering). There's been announcements of enterprise caliber Opteron systems with 64 processors or more (by HP I believe? I don't have a URL offhand), but for now Opteron remains primarily a processor for the DIY crowd.
Personally I think Intel and HP will see their investments into Itanium through until the end, that HP will continue to slowly retire their PA-RISC and AlphaServer lines while coaxing their existing customer base onto IA64. Furthermore, I see HP buying SGI sometime in the near future... SGI has some excellent IP and seems to be ahead of everyone, with the possible exception of IBM, in the race to make Linux enterprise-worthy, and most of all, SGI has been a wholehearted adopter of IA64 (they still continue to develop MIPS, but not too terribly actively) Ultimately, I see HP overtaking Sun permanently in the server market, and pushing Linux/HP-UX on IA64.
I also forsee increased collaboration between Sun and Fujitsu, with technologies from UltraSPARC and SPARC64 eventually merging into a line of collaboratively developed, massively SMT processors. IBM is doing much the same thing with Power5, which will support 4 hardware threads, and with such advanced fabrication plants as its Fishkill plant I expect they'll remain the leader in fabrication technologies, at least for the near future.
That's just me attempting to peer into my crystal ball... ultimately my vote goes to Itanium... the current issues with inadequate compilers will slowly resolve themselves, and Intel and HP are in so deep already that they want to make up their losses by seeing it through to the end, rather than being bound to what are, in their eyes, inferior architectures (i.e. x86-64 for Intel, PA-RISC for HP)
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