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HP's Itanium Gamble May Be Hard To Win
Having previously told customers of its MIPS-, Alpha-, and PA-RISC-based systems that it would phase out servers based on those processors over the next few years, HP made perhaps its biggest move in that transition this week with the introduction of the first NonStop server based on Itanium. About 25% of HP’s Business Critical Server unit revenue is derived from Integrity-based systems, and HP believes that will grow to 50% by the end of the year and 70% by the end of 2006. But one wonders who HP is trying to convince with those projections, the public or itself? Can a new processor architecture supported by only one major server manufacturer succeed long term? Although IBM offers Itanium-based servers, it has never been a strong supporter of the architecture and would rather steer customers to its own Power-based server lines. The high-end Itanium has never been a good fit for Dell, which makes its mark delivering the higher-volume Xeon-based systems. Sun has its own high-performance RISC architecture, Sparc. That leaves HP and other second-tier server vendors to carry Itanium forward. You can also make a case that Itanium’s greatest success has been in making Advanced Micro Devices a reinvigorated player in the microprocessor market over the past two years. When Intel decided that x86-incompatible Itanium represented the future for 64-bit processing, AMD saw an opening and introduced its AMD64 architecture, which provided a compatible extension for 64-bit computing into the volume x86 world. Customers and systems manufacturers quickly answered affirmatively that the future for x86 processing was indeed in 64-bit computing, and Intel was forced to belatedly move its x86 strategy to include 64-bit instruction sets. Intel says Itanium revenue grew 100% from 2003 to 2004, but that was working from a small starting point, and the company has been reluctant to provide specifics on Itanium performance since. The future for Itanium may be still be strong, but it will be up to Intel and HP to shoulder the burden of keeping the architecture alive in the years ahead. « More IT Jobs May Leave Europe In Wake of France's 'Non' Vote | Main | Supercomm News To Watch Out For Next Week » |
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