Intel: x86 won't encroach on Itanium

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destroyed the growth opportunity for big iron," he said.

At the same time, Itanium has the potential to grab a bigger share of the market that remains, at the expense of Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc and IBM's Power, he said.

"Over the next few years, I think Itanium is going to start looking really interesting."

--Martin Reynolds,
analyst, Gartner

So far, Itanium machines have made a modest dent in the server market. Server customers purchased $1.6 billion worth of Itanium machines in 2004, up from $448 million in 2003, Reynolds said.

By comparison, x86 server purchases grew from $21.1 billion to $24.6 billion between 2003 and 2004. Sparc system purchases shrank slightly from $6.9 billion to $6.7 billion, while Power purchases shrank from $7.2 billion to $7.1 billion, Reynolds said.

Hewlett-Packard, which co-developed Itanium, has separate x86 and Itanium server families that are aligned with Intel's view of the market. But the three remaining major server manufacturers, which along with HP control 80 percent of the server market, have differences of opinion.

IBM, the largest server maker and the acknowledged leader in powerful machines, is pushing 32-processor x86 servers--in other words, big-iron x86 machines. Dell believes big iron is a dead-end market and instead believes groups of linked x86 machines will rule the roost. And Sun is working on powerful servers using x86 chips from Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices.

IBM and Sun, of course, can't be expected to warmly embrace an Itanium processor aimed squarely at their core product lines. Sun derides Itanium as effectively dead, while IBM has decided to forsake its own Itanium servers.

Intel doesn't hesitate now to call out IBM's Power as the top Itanium rival. "We are going to compete head-on for every socket versus Power," Gelsinger said.

Of IBM's Itanium decision, he added, "We're disappointed, but it's not an irrational strategy," given that IBM has Power to promote. And the

[fred dunn]

Intel is delusional...

Cite their push of RDRAM, and their total exclusion of x86 64 bit extensions. This is another bad decision that has gone too far.

If and when Intel designs an Itanium with efficient x86 VM microcode then they will pull it off, otherwise the original big metal players will kill them due to their experience in the market.