"With the arrival of the AMD Opteron and Intel Itanium,
commodity servers built on these processors have joined proprietary
RISC systems from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and
others in the 64-bit landscape. With prices starting at just over
$2,000, Opteron and Itanium systems--running Linux or Windows--are
already carving out a niche in high-performance computing clusters,
where they are used to run compute-intensive scientific- and
financial-modeling applications. Eventually they will replace their
32-bit forebears in corporate datacenters, and clusters of them may
even challenge 64-bit Unix systems costing hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
"How long this will take depends on software vendors, who must
rewrite their applications for the new 64-bit CPUs. Many operating
systems are already available for Opteron and Itanium. In addition
to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1, which supports Itanium, and
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, which supports both Itanium and
Opteron, there is an Itanium version of Windows Server 2003, and
Itanium and Opteron versions of Turbolinux Enterprise Server 8.
Databases such as IBM DB2 and Oracle 9i, and application servers
from IBM, Oracle, and BEA Systems should begin to be available this
year. But enterprise app vendors, with the exception of SAP, have
been slow to commit to a road map of support..."
