Is this conventional wisdom? How does a petaflop race affect app servers and databases? It seems like most traditional server workloads could get by without a single FPU. The only thing they have in common is IO. Are there many data centers using Infiniband? (Maybe there are I don't know.)
The Cell architecture is an evolutionary dead end. SPARC is no more of a threat to X86 now than before. GPUs may be the next big thing for HPC but its got a long way to go to get out of its niche in the server market. (That niche being... face detection for photo sharing sites? Black-Scholes? Help me out here.)
I mean, I agree with your overall point, but I think it's more likely that ARM will steal all the data center work before anything from the HPC world does. They are too focused on LINPACK.