RCK, Itanic, and POWER Speculation

Dave commented, "If RCK shows up in 2009, great, if not, the 4xT2+ will be enough for my applications, running LDom's and Containers."

Jesper commented, "'good enough' is the key word here. You have to remember that the other hardware vendors also move forward. If Rock comes out in late 2009, early 2010 it will be facing POVER7. Which looks a bit like a monster."

I agree. POWER looks very competitive on the horizon.

Sun has been spot-on with every release of the CoolThreads processors, releasing early instead of late.

A 16 core SPARC CoolThreads, a 16 core SPARC RCK , a Fujitsu VII+, a POWER 7, and 4 core Itanium may all show up this year or early next - I don't count any of them out.

If course, AMD and Intel are fighting it out for x64 dominance. I am hopeful for AMD, since they singlehandedly kept the x8 architecture from going the way of the dinosaur (by releasing a 64 bit architecture and forcing Intel to build 64 bit extensions.)

Any of the vendors could have a silicon failure, causing severe problems with their road maps. Sun and Fujitsu are most able to deal with a silicon failure, with SPARC T, SPARC RCK, and SPARC64 VII+ in their future. SPARC vendors are triple-sourced, with some level of overlap.

Hybrid x64 manufacturers like IBM, HP, and Dell are well positioned to deal with silicon failures, since they are dual-sourced.

Single sourced vendors like IBM POWER and HP/Intel Itanium are least able to deal with a silicon failure. IBM and Intel have deep pockets, which are not so deep during global recessions like we are having now. A silicon failure could be catastrophic for AIX or HP-UX during times like this.

As the old saying goes, "it's not over, until the fat lady sings!"