"6] IBM seems to be losing more money on processors every year, and the people I know at IBM have their resumes polished, because they don't expect POWER development to continue seriously (at least in the U.S.) for more than another generation or two, if that. Oracle is pouring money into SPARC, but it's not clear why, because SPARC has been basically dead for years."
both IBM and Oracle have committed to two more generations of POWER nor SPARC. also there is Fujitsu keeping investing into SPARC. these uarchs are not going to go away anytime soon. they are high-margin niche products in the enterprise space and government with considerable footprints and huge long term service contracts attached to them.
POWER and SPARC are not competing against low-power CPU's but aim for the high-socket count, large unified memory, RAS market which for some workloads is the only alternative.
especially SPARC while having shrinking market share still makes Oracle more than a billion annually. afaik IBM's Power division is not loosing money either.
long story short: in the next five years there will be at least four ISA's (ARM, SPARC, POWER, X86) in the server space, but not all compete for the same markets.
both IBM and Oracle have committed to two more generations of POWER nor SPARC. also there is Fujitsu keeping investing into SPARC. these uarchs are not going to go away anytime soon. they are high-margin niche products in the enterprise space and government with considerable footprints and huge long term service contracts attached to them.
POWER and SPARC are not competing against low-power CPU's but aim for the high-socket count, large unified memory, RAS market which for some workloads is the only alternative.
especially SPARC while having shrinking market share still makes Oracle more than a billion annually. afaik IBM's Power division is not loosing money either.
long story short: in the next five years there will be at least four ISA's (ARM, SPARC, POWER, X86) in the server space, but not all compete for the same markets.
interesting times ahead!