Generally no chip can be all things to all people, but if vendors could be bothered providing their software on alternative architectures that would be cool. (only if they bothered making all the special optimizations though and not just a straight port)

Maybe I want a DB that doesn't need to scale too much but needs some heavy crypto lifting, that would probably come out pretty well on the new SUN T2 if it was written to take advantage of all the on chip optimized crypto. But code quality is bad enough these days without trying to produce different versions for even the top 5 chip architectures.

What would be better (for the customer at any rate) is if the concept of ODBC and SQL standards were more pervasive, complete and performant in all vendor products so that I could choose the DB software and chip architecture that suits the project I'm working on and know that the SQL I write and the wire protocol I communicate with server on could be pointed at a different box with different software and chip and just work. The performance profile might be different obviously but I'm sick of software that will only run on Oracle or SQL server, I want it to run on what is best for me and the skills I have available to deploy, not the skills of the vendor who wrote the application that I want.

What makes you think IA64 version is going to disappear soon??