@Beachrider
I do not agree with much you say, some things are just plain wrong.
"...IBM is prepared with higher GHz CPUs, higher thread-count processors (96/socket by Fall) and fancy I/O for Power 7+. ..."
Dont you know that GHz does not necessarily imply good performance? Do you remember Intel Pentium4 which had high GHz, and very low performance?
Or, do you happen to know about the new IBM z196 Mainframe cpu "the worlds fastest cpu" at 5.26GHz with 300MB cache? It has lower performance than a Intel Nehalem-EX and costs much more.
Have you heard about the slow POWER6 at 5GHz? You needed six POWER6 servers with 14 POWER6 cpus at very high clock, to match one Sun T5440 with four 1.4GHz Niagara T2+ when we talk about Siebel 8.0 benchmarks.
Or, the IBM CELL. You need thirteen CELL cpus at 3.2GHz to match one Niagara T2+ at 1.4GHz in string pattern matching. That is, 42GHz worth of aggregate GHz to match 1.4GHz. That is a factor of 29.7. You need ~30 times more GHz if you use IBM cpu CELL to match one Niagara T2+. that is quite bad.
So you are wrong when you imply that high GHz equals good performance. IBM gear disproves your claim.
.
Regarding IBM having higher thread count processors (96/socket) - what do you mean? I mean, Niagara T3 has 128 threads per cpu. To me it seems that 128 threads are more than 96 threads. Maybe you dont know about Oracle cpus? Niagara T3 has several world records today, beating POWER7 in some benches.
.
.
"....[IBM] will NOT be dropping the price dramatically, though. IBM's investors were clearly surprised by the price-drop in early 2010 and have exerted pressure to not-have IBM attempt to make Power 7 a dollar-to-dollar competitor to Intel's commodity business. They want Power to sell at a substantial premium over x64...."
What are you talking about? POWER6 servers costed like 5-10x more than x86 servers. Now the POWER7 costs 3x more than x86 servers. Today the Intel Westmere-EX 32nm is something ~10% slower than POWER7:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4285/westmereex-intels-flagship-benchmarked
The 22nm version will be 40% faster according to Intel. In that case, it will be faster than POWER7. IBM has no choice but keep lowering their price. Why would anyone buy a slower and 3x more expensive POWER7 server than a cheap faster x86 server?
In a couple of years, Intel and AMD 20core cpus, will easily be faster than everything IBM has. That is when IBM will see their POWER sales dwindle, and they start to lower the price. Finally, x86 will be very much faster and cheaper - that is the point where IBM will kill POWER and AIX. As IBM executives officially said: they will kill off AIX.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-982512.html
Then there is no reason to continue development of POWER. It will be killed off too. IBM must continue lower prices in the future. Gone are the high margin AIX systems. Left are the slow IBM Mainframes which has a high margin.
As I said, I dont agree with you much. Much of what you say is errorneous.