What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium?

"I work for a major research organization. Of late a lot of the normal big computer companies have been visiting and preaching the gospel of Itanium. My question to them, and to the assembled masses here at Slashdot is what happens next when Itanium is real? My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)? In other words, has Intel finally done in most of their customers by obliterating all the other CPU choices (except IBM Power4 [& friends G4, et al] and AMD Hammer) and turned the remainder of the marketplace into raw commodity goods? Lest you defend the other CPUs... Sparc is dead, Sun doesn't have the money (more than US$1B we'll guess) to do another round. PA-RISC is done, as HP has given away the architecture group. MIPS lacks funding (and perhaps even the idea people at this point). Alpha is gone too (also because of the heavy investment problem no doubt). Most other CPUs don't have an installed base that makes any difference, especially in the high end computing world. So what's next? I don't like the single track future that Intel has just because it is a single track!"

Comments

Dead? I doubt it.

[BlackStar]

SPARC dead? I'm not sure where you come across that idea. Having listened to a few talks down at JavaOne and chatted briefly with Marc Tremblay (head chip dude down there, father of MAJC and one designer of SPARC) they've already got design down on the next two levels of SPARC as the IV is experimental, and the V is the next production level as I understand it. MAJC seems to be the experimental platform they are using for smaller implementations and alternative ideas to be tried, based on some of Tremblay's theories.

I may be off base on some of the details, but Sun has a unified approach from top to bottom, from tools to silicon for the systems they plan to deliver. I doubt it will just throw in the towel. Ultimately, Sun ships iron, and they lead the market in their segment.

I don't see the basis for your assertion, and where you pulled 1B out of for cost I also don't know.

Alpha is AMD now, as that's where a good chunk of the people went. MIPS is still kicking, with the 14000 so far, but I won't speak to the future of that chip line. There's a lot of chip heads on this site with much better info than I on many of the lines.

One decent, although dated summary is here

Please tell me there's more information you're basing this on than consumer workstation marketshare....