Look at Apple as a good case in point: The most successful 64-bit adoption rate has got to be here, with the Apple G5 line of desktops and servers. The innards of these machines are truly a joy to behold " and this coming from a guy that likes to keep the covers off his equipment not because they are beautiful to look at but for practical reasons. To make things even more interesting, Apple just came out with their on multiprocessor 64-bit XServe rack-mounted server line that is one of best values for the money for a high-availability, high-horsepower machine.
AMD is talking about four-way servers selling for less than $5,000 by next spring " this is a price point that Intel will have a hard time matching.
Added to the cheap supply of machines is a growing talent pool of white box builders who can assemble some very impressive clusters of machines; see the report I did in April on the Flash Mob assembling their own cluster out of donated equipment. Granted, much of this gear wasn't 64-bit, but it could be, and several of the world's fastest
supercomputers are now routinely assembled from non-Intel gear. (see: http://strom.com/awards/365.html and http://www.top500.org
Another issue is the growing trend that the low-volume system builder is doing more innovation than the big guys at Dell, HP, and elsewhere in terms of making better servers. It used to be that white boxes were more popular on desktops than in the server rooms. Those IT shops that were willing to take chances on no-name gear weren't willing to run their servers on them. That has changed, and now it is safe for the white box to come into those raised-floor air conditioned computing palaces.
Research at my sister publication, CRN shows that the server white box market share has come at the expense of HP, who has lost 7 percentage points on their recent surveys year over year:
http://www.crn.com/sections/hardfacts/hardfact.asp?ArticleID=50215
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