Intel Itanium, how is it doing?

Economy of scale

With all the attention currently going to 32 bit processors with 64-bit extensions, such as the Intel Xeon Woodcrest and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, it feels like the Intel Itanium has been given the cold shoulder. Time to set this right and to take a look at the past, present and future of the Intel Itanium.

The Intel Itanium (Merced) is a special processor and its first iteration was released unto the market five years ago. The Itanium was developed in a time when Intel's superiority in the desktop market was unchallenged and the company felt and thought that it had nothing to worry about from companies like AMD. During this time period Intel was looking for a new challenge, which it found in the server and workstation market. Companies such as HP, IBM and Sun had up till then, dominated this market. Intel's main goal wasn't only to gain entry into a very lucrative market but also of bringing the advantages of the desktop, notebook and server pc market together in this segment of the market.

Economy of scale

Without delving too deeply into the science of Economics when we refer to economies of scale we refer to the positive effect of having a multitude of manufacturers producing pc's and parts. The positive effect of this on the market is that, parts are easy to get hold of and that the majority of these parts are interchangeable of each other, this translates into reductions in development costs but also into lower costs for the consumer. Due to this the end user is not bound by necessity to the products or architecture of one manufacturer. If your not happy with one product then its relatively simple to simply go to another supplier. This forces manufacturers to keep the overall costs down but also to be innovative so as to make their product stand out from the crowd.

Intel's strategy seems to be working insofar that seven manufacturers have accepted the Itanium platform: Bull, HP, Fujitsu Siemens, NEC, Hitachi, Unisys and SGI, its even possible for smaller Intel partners to offer solutions based on the Itanium platform. The total number of software partners in the Itanium Solutions Alliance (www.itaniumsolutionalliance.org) is growing steadily and more and more complete software solutions are becoming available for this platform. It should be stated though that Intel has revised some of its earlier plans in reference to the Itanium processor. Originally Intel was planning on implementing the Itanium in workstations but alas these plans never came to fruition and the Itanium has since become a server only product.