By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they r

By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they ran their web crawler and search engine entirely on PCs. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997, then Microsoft promptly announced that the service would be switched over to Windows. Till then, according to Wikipedia [1], Hotmail ran some Sun boxes, but also a lot of FreeBSD, and I am almost certain that the FreeBSD was running on PCs. They were probably the largest email provider in the world in 1997. The Apache web server "was the most popular web server by Spring 1996 and stayed like that until the Summer of 2014" [2]. It ran and runs almost exclusively on Linux, which in turn ran and runs almost exclusively on x86. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com 2: https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-server-how-it-all-came-together/ https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-...