Tony Hill wrote:
- NEC actually had the highest average server cost for Itaniums at
$158,000 per server. SGI was only at $139,000 and HP much further
down at $52,000, though well ahead of Dell's average of $21,000

Yeah, gotta wonder about that. I thought the highest end Itaniums were
supposed to be those SGI's? What with all of that supercomputer stuff they
keep selling to NASA, etc. And who the hell are NEC's customers that they
command such huge avg sales prices?

- The top 6 Itanium vendors listed accounted for 98.7% of all Itanium
sales by volume and 98.1% by revenue. This is in direct contrast to
Opteron sales where the top 4 vendors managed only 23.5% of all sales
by volume and 25.7% by revenue. In other words, Opteron is definitely
a "commodity" server chip while Itanium is definitely not.

Yup, in a commodity processor, you gotta expect that the white boxers are at
an advantage here. The OEMs are going to have compete against them based on
something other than straight price: bundled software, services, etc.

IBM is also falling behind the other two American server vendors, HP and
Sun, on the Opteron front. Why aren't they introducing more sophisticated
4-way Opterons, like the other two have already?

Yousuf Khan