Interconnect may be faster but as a whole system it is hard to compete with the raw speed of an x64 box with all the latest/greatest chipsets. You usually wind

Interconnect may be faster but as a whole system it is hard to compete with the raw speed of an x64 box with all the latest/greatest chipsets. You usually wind up having to write non-portable code to eke full performance out of the massive box and in the end your apps will probably still be faster on x64. They're best suited for massive parallel computation that isn't afraid of getting down to the metal and taking advantage of lots of the special chip instructions in asm. (Or alternatively you want POWER specifically because it has hardware dfp support.) The total gain from running on x64 will most likely exceed any loss from a network hop in a case where both have to go off to SAN for their data.