Intel was all goosebumps about the Itanium this year, believing 2006 would be the year of it's comeback. They managed to get HP to jump on board, once again pushing the chip that has been doomed to failure again and again. Sadly for it, the curse continues. HP was the only company able to post any significant sales out of the Itanium, with the majority of people turning to other vendors such as IBM and Sun:
The curse of the Itanic continued to haunt HP in the third quarter. The server maker suffered through the period as the only Tier 1 unable to post a significant uptick in sales. Most of HP's woes appear to have resulted from flagging high-end server sales, as some customers side with Itanium, while others move to IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Montecito has now arrived, and once again Intel is full of promises about what it can deliver. While sales for Itanium grow for HP, it continues to be outpaced by other offerings. Will this continue? With so many other "low-end" offerings that outpace in features and performance, from the Opteron to the Xeon, the high-end server market is beginning to shrink. HP and Fujitsu, both pushing the Itanium, saw significant losses in high end server sales this quarter.