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

4 years ago..

[Marx_Mrvelous]

I would never have thought that AMD couldm possibl be successful. I was wrong then. I'm hoping/thinking that some other company will come up with a competing idea, get their foot in the foot, and surprise the world.

Clockless Processors

[bcjanes]

As long as processors are limitted by a clock speed, they are being held back. Asynchronous processors would cause other problems with the rest of the system hoever, data bits crashing in the mobo circuitry and the like.

Now if we had fiberoptic mobo's and circuit boards, holographic RAM, and figured out a permanent storage solution replacing hard drives that used optics for storage and data transfer, the rest of the system might stand a chance of keeping up.