It is generally accepted as common knowledge that the high-end
RISC server vendors—IBM and Oracle—have been bleeding market
share in favor of high-end Intel Xeon based servers. Indeed, the
RISC market accounts for about 150k units while the x86 market
has almost 10 million servers. About 5% of those 10 million
units are high-end x86 servers, so the Xeon E7 server volume is
probably only 2-4 times the size of the whole RISC market.
Still, that tiny amount of RISC servers represents about 50% of
the server market revenues.  But the RISC vendors have finally
woken up. IBM has several Power7+ based servers that are more or
less price competitive with the Xeon E7. Sun/Oracle's server
CPUs have been lagging severely in performance. The UltraSPARC
T1 and T2 for example were pretty innovative but only performed
well in a very small niche of the market, while offering almost
ridicously low performance in any application (HPC, BI, ERP )
that needed decent per-thread performance.  Quite surprisingly,
Oracle has been ext