From: William H. Magill (magillmcgillsociety.org)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 00:41:31 CDT

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On Monday, June 23, 2003, at 10:44 PM, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> I always wondered why IBM said it didn't see much of a future with
> x86-64 by mid-2004. I first heard of the IBM PowerPC 970 last year,
> but
> I didn't know it was going to make that big of a splash. I guess we
> now
> know why.
>
> Also remember this is just a Power4, and the Power5 hits next year.
> It's not only the first 64-bit Power chip released with 32-bit PowerPC
> compatibility, but the first of a suspected long-line of Power chips
> from IBM (instead of only producing them to the most stringent
> standards). Yes, IBM is going to make it a commodity comeback.
>
> Yes, I think I agree with you Mr. Magill. I think we've found our new
> 64-bit RISC home.
>
> Especially since there is also a sub-20W version that still runs at
> 1.2GHz+. Bam! I already love Apple for notebooks, largely because PC
> portables are just as proprietary (and some are more so) and no
> cheaper.

Also... Remember what killed the Alpha -- quantity, or rather, the lack
thereof.

IBM has a much larger internal demand for Power chips than DEC ever had
for Alphas ... but Apple has a demand that is probably an order of
magnitude greater than IBM itself!

That means the per chip price is dirt cheap... which will work its way
up through the entire Foundry... Expect AIX based "servers" to drop in
price while increasing in performance.

And at $3K for a box with two 2ghz cpus and a 1ghz system bus from
Apple that implies that IBM might offer a "midrange server" in the
under $10K range that will offer price performance that will simply
kill SPARC virtually overnight, not to mention Dell's foray into that
market. ... and it will offer upward compatibility into the rest of the
Power line.

Couple this with the fact that IBM DOES have decent compiler
technology, significant experience with emulation from the 68K to
PowerPC migration, and, unlike Digital, Compaq or HP, DOES understand
Marketing -- Itanium with Alpha inside is likely to prove too little
too late.

And also remember, Intel has said that Itanium would not be offered for
desktop machines.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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