Last week we heard about Intel and HP (along with others) getting ready to pour an incredible amount of money into continued Itanium development and promotion. Now, many Itanium-supporting vendors (the Itanium Solutions Alliance) have gotten together behind this fundage and, despite the difficulty of moving Itanium in the past, have committed to helping the chip make it. The actual press release is available as a webcast, and as it turns out the $10 Billion wasn't really all that much of a difference compared to the amount of money already being spent on the Itanium project. It seems their goal has shifted too, with attacks on IBM and Sun instead of the entire server market.
"Of course, it's easier to find flashy wins at HP, which sold $620m worth of Itanium servers in the third quarter, according to Gartner, rather than scrounging through Bull's $15m in sales for a decent customer. Incidentally, no other member of the ISA shipped more than 335 Itanium servers in the third quarter, according to Gartner, while HP shipped 6,200 systems. Does ISA really spell PA-RISC/Alpha replacement?"
Everyone is going dual-core these days, and as the article brings out, dual-core Itanium has already been delayed much further than other flavors of enterprise chips. The uphill battle for Itanium just keeps getting steeper.