Sun has been suffering quite a bit of hits from the competitors lately, thus losing more of its market share in the server and server processors market. The company has been too slow developing its product families, so that its today’s UltraSPARC III looks very unattractive in terms of performance against the competitors’ background. Moreover, UltraSPARC IV is just a 0.13micron version of the predecessor. We can expect something really new only from UltraSPARC V, but his is still a while ahead, as we can hardly hope to see it before 2005.

Alpha? The situation here is mostly evident: the architecture has no future. HP made a long-term stake on Itanium, Samsung hasn’t been very active here, either. Nevertheless, the inertia of this architecture is big enough, so it will keep developing even without any support on the side. Small but powerful 1.25GHz EV68 appeared powerful enough to compete with a more serious-looking Power4, and its EV7 successor turns out the today’s most powerful solution for multi-processor complexes. Besides, HP is going to introduce a 0.13micron EV7 version aka EV79 this year, which will boast a much larger L2 cache and will support faster PC1066 RDRAM.

The major question, however, is not about the technical characteristics of the processors, but about the power behind them: are they ready to ensure strong support? From this point of view and also due to their technical potential, Itanium and Power4+ will definitely be among the leaders one day. The future of Athlon 64 and Opteron is not quite clear. Everything depends on their ability to use the 64bit potential to the full extent, which means that they will need 64bit operation systems and mass applications. And the situation here is far from good today. However, this is not at all surprising: it took Microsoft about 10 years to shift from 16bit to 32bit.