@A.C
"....you cannot quote a misquote from 2003 as fact..."
Am I "misquoting" the official statements from IBM? How am I misquoting them? I am trying to explain to Jesper Frimann, that according to IBM, AIX will be killed off and replaced by Linux. How is this a misquote? Please cite me, and the article I linked to - and if you can point out any errors in my understanding of the article I will stop say false things. If you can not point out my misunderstandings, then maybe it is you who misunderstood the official statements from IBM?
.
.
"...What has happened since 2003? Well AIX was 3rd in the market and has now not only passed Solaris and HP but is 50% of the Unix market. I think a lot has changed since Power4 and AIX 4.3...."
So? It seems that you dont really understand me. I say that long ago, POWER6 was several times faster than x86 and it costed 5-10x more. Today, POWER7 is ~10% faster than Intel Westmere-EX but costs 3x more. Future POWER cpus will cost 1-2x more, but ideally will be cheaper than x86 or they will not sell.
Yes, a lot has changed since POWER4. The trend is clear: AIX/POWER is not a high margin business anymore. IBM had to lower the price of their best CPU yet (the mighty POWER7) because IBM is afraid of the competition from x86 and Niagara. This means something.
I predict that IBM's fear will increase, and future POWER cpus will be cheaper and cheaper. There will be a time in the future when IBM POWER can not compete with x86. x86 will catch up on POWER. You know that. I know that. This is true. The trend is clear, it will happen. Some time after, IBM will kill POWER, because IBM can not afford to loose money on expensive and slow POWER cpus, with a diminishing market share. That is when AIX will be discontinued.
Do you really think that IBM will release a future POWER cpu that is many times faster than x86, so IBM can continue to charge 5-10x more? No. Those days are gone. x86 will be faster. And AIX does not run on x86. So AIX on POWER will be no more. This is true. Even IBM executives see this trend.
Next year, the 22nm Ivy Bridge from Intel will arrive. It will be 40% faster (according to Intel) than today's Sandybridge. Thus, it will be faster than POWER7. IBM must make sure that POWER8 is much faster than x86, there will be no point in spending billions on R&D on a slower POWER8 cpu.
So, AIX and POWER is soon obsolete. Itanium is obsolete (this is a pity). Better start to learn Linux on x86. The thing is, the managers dont understand that POWER and Itanium has much better RAS than x86, and that x86 is a piece of buggy shit. They just look at the cheapest performance / money, and x86 is the future. The managers will only consider OS that runs on x86.