HP abandons Itanium2 in workstations

[dsavage@peaknet.net]

Last Friday InfoWorld on-line and ZDNet each ran stories about HP halting
production of their Itanium-based workstations. Their decision is hardly
surprising, given the low sales of HP zx2000 and zx6000 workstations.

The real story here is that HP and Intel co-designed the Itanium chip to
be binary compatible with HP's Palo Alto (PA-)RISC processor and to
provide an evolutionary pathway for all those legacy HP systems. With HP's
departure from the Itanium workstation market, that chip's only future
lies in SMP servers and clustered arrays -- hardly a mass market. And many
existing PA-RISC customers must now begin planning for end-of-life
conversions.

Craig Barrett's imminent departure as Intel's CEO probably has more to do
with his approaching retirement age than the Itanium debacle, but look for
a major shakeup in their product line when a new CEO takes the helm. AMD's
Athlon processors now power more than half of all PCs sold. Their Opteron
and Athlon64 x86-64 processors are headed toward dominance in the
workstation and server markets, despite eleventh hour efforts by Intel to
compete with Xeon processors with 64-bit extensions grafted on. No amount
of collusion with Microsoft to delay the release of 64-bit Windows will
forestall the inevitible. To survive, Intel must go back to the drawing
boards and develop an Opteron-compatible CPU that's faster and cheaper
than AMD's. And they must do it by 2006.

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL

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