"Tony Hill" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 01:08:41 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08...nium_sales_q2/

Hmm.. to be fair to Intel though, their 5,665 server units generated
nearly twice as much revenue as the 60,000 Opteron units. On a
per-unit basis, each Itanium server is selling for more than 17 times
as much as your average Opteron server (~$56,000 vs. ~$3,100).

Too bad those are server prices, not per-CPU prices. If the average Opteron
were 2-way and the average Itanic were 32-way, that wouldn't be notable.
Too bad for Intel that's not the case.

A couple other interesting tid-bits from this articles:

- HP still sells 85% of all Itaniums by volume and 78% by revenue.

- SGI managed only 12.5% of all Itanium revenue, despite the
high-profile sales

Neither of those is particularly surprising, after HP dropped HPPA and Alpha
and now SGI is only a shell of its former self (though still employing some
top-notch folks).

- 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

The latter three are not surprising; they fit in with general perception of
the quality vs. price tradeoffs each vendor is known for. NEC is the
standout; I hadn't paid any attention to them at all.

- 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.

That was the entire point of Opteron -- bringing 64-bit computing to the
commodity market. Oh, and taking market share away from Xeon, and showing
IT managers what a stupid idea it is to lock themselves into proprietary
IA64 when they can run open AMD64 systems.

Interesting numbers, been a while since we've seen them. While
Itanium sales do continue to grow, they aren't all that impressive.
It seems like after taking into account seasonal variability that
Itanium sales have been flat since Q4 of last year.

What we need are CPU volume and ASP instead of server numbers.

S

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Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
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