Today it costs >100k$ for a large Sun machine with 64bit addressing and the ability to load 12Gb of physical ram. Next year, AMD and Intel will be introducing 64 bit server chips. The AMD offering (Sledgehammer, Opteron) will be the least pain in my opinion to get software going on it. Once that time comes, jobs that once used to be the domain of Sun/Solaris machines will become the work of cheaper farms of AMD/Intel based cpu's. The effect of this will be pronounced since companies that depend on simulations (IC companies for example) can afford to have more of what is usually a fairly tight resource. Sun will still enjoy it's large processor #, large memory capable machines but many tasks that once required that large iron will get migrated to these cheaper alternatives.

As the telecom space continues to melt down and as the good engineers at these places go on the dole or find work in other non-telecom fields, who is going to make these switches hubs and routers when, in the limit, those legacy ports start going dark? Technology is momemtum based, left unattended, it will slip back into the primordial ooze and we will be reinventing the vacuum tube. Hmmm an edge router made from vacuum tubes...