TPM shows his IBM love again
As usual, TPM never has a crossed word to say about IBM...
> IBM has a tidy business selling Power-derived processors for game-console makers Sony,
> Nintendo, and Microsoft, and also gets a fair amount of development money – hundreds of
> millions of dollars a year – from the US government and supercomputing centers for high-
> end Power-based clusters.
>
> Itanium does not have these assets backing it up. There's just Intel making them and HP
> selling them at this point, with a few boxes being sold by Bull, NEC, and a few upstarts such
> as Super Micro, Huawei Technologies, and Inspur.
Ah, so you are saying that IBM's "not-so-profitable" Microprocessor division is propped up by making volume processors in the same fabs, and sharing some of the designs.
But Intel's "not-so-profitable" Itanium division is apparently not propped up by making Itanium in the same fabs and sharing some designs with a volume processor? Funny I thought there was this processor out there called Xeon which had a pretty reasonable volume, is made on the same fab lines as Itanium and shares a bunch of chipset technology? If TPM applies this logic to Power, he has to apply it to Itanium as well.
Good luck to IBM in this space, but I suspect for every 100 customers that decide to get off SPARC or Itanium 99 will go to x86 anyway - as the leader in x86 systems, HP will most likely get the majority of these - the systems themselves obviously command much smaller revenues and margins than commercial UNIX systems, but the door into the data center is open for selling the rest of HP's portfolio