It's hard to see the Itanium Solutions Alliance accomplishing anything major that the billions already spent by HP, Intel, and the rest haven't. You don't see an x86 Solutions Alliance.

Intel let a competitor sneak into a market where they weren't before. Still, it was hard to believe that AMD would be able to maintain the kind of performance lead that they have enjoyed over the past one to two years.

Intel woke up from its frequency delusion and is now going full-bore on dual-core.

Enterprises must either adopt multi core or stick with slower chips.

If developers don't make the transition to Apple and Intel, they'll probably be making the transition to Windows and Intel. Intel doesn't have a lot to lose.

Sun has to keep up with the other guys. IBM is going to be coming out with the Power5+ soon. The reality is in this industry you have to put a lot of energy into running to stay in place. What happens if you don't make these kinds of advances is you fall behind. So this upgrade is in some respects about maintaining parity with the competition.