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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Intel caves on Itanium
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The Register reports that intel is caving on the "year of itanium":
A few gallons of rancid egg nog were poured this week all over the "Year of Itanium" celebration underway at Intel, as an analyst firm predicted Intel will not only give in and ship a x86-64bit chip but also that the product will be woefully behind in the market.
...
"Our research suggests Itanium is in for a rough ride," Whittington writes in a recent research note. "Intel is now saying it will "go with the market" on 64-bit x86, thus is destined to unveil one when they think the market will ripen, which we judge as mid-2004 for volume delivery in 2005.
Why is intel going to make this move? Well, the story goes on:
Intel is edging close to breaking the 5,000 servers shipped per quarter barrier. With robust sales right around the corner, why would Intel introduce an Itanic competitor now?
Well, it so happens that AMD is already moving more than 10,000 Opteron boxes a quarter. That's more than the total number of Itanium boxes shipped all year. If this x86-64-bit thing is taking off, Intel really would prefer not to be left too far behind. Add to that Sun Microsystems' recent entrance into the Opteron market along with IBM's support, and things start to seem a bit worrying.
Looks to me like intel made a serious slip when they went down the Itanium path
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