Yeah, that&#x27;s more or less the argument I was making - (though I seem to recall that it wasn&#x27;t until the late 90&#x27;s that the sun user land was 64bit, it was all still 32bit) I don&#x27;t consider Windows Server a really good general purpose server system, its excellent at some workloads though.<p>IA-64 was a mistake, it has hurt everyone who touched it, I believe it killed VMS (beyond the crazy way VMS is licensed) (and did no favors for HP-UX either.) - it is and was too hard to build a really efficient compiler for - thankfully microsofts porting effort to IA-64 got the codebase set up to go to AMD64.<p>In many ways though, as much as I&#x27;d like to see other microarchitectures, x86 is the UNIX of hardware, it&#x27;s good enough for most applications, and in the long run, good always beats perfect.