Clear what up? Itanium was on Pricewatch for months, from multiple vendors, and was its own listed category. Now it's gone.
I posted that I expected that when Itanium III came out to replace Itanium II, Itaniums would be back on pricewatch. Let's see who's right about this, it won't be long. I think that once Intel has a bug-free Itanium to ship, they'll be on pricewatch again - say, 30-90 days from now, depending on whether or not Intel manages decent yields of those enormous caches.
First, the market for RISC processors has grown over the past few years
What, you "decided" that this is how things are? The total number of Intel-based servers shipped in the third quarter edged up 2% from the second quarter, and 14% from the same period a year ago.
However, sales of servers with RISC processors fell from 53,956 units in the second quarter to 46,180 in the third quarter. http://www.cw360.com/Article117394.htm
and:
The change in fortunes for Intel servers was foreshadowed by U.S. server sales in the third quarter, when Gartner Dataquest said Intel server sales exceeded RISC sales. Buying patterns in the United States often spread later to the rest of the world.
Back to growth For the first time since 2000, the server market will grow again, the report predicted, driven largely by increasing sales of Intel servers running Windows and Linux. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-965865.html
"Servers running Windows and Linux" - the mainstream server market, the commodity server market, this is the market that AMD is going after wtih the Opteron, while Intel tries to make Itanium into the next Alpha.
I think Intel has been scared by Opteron, and you will see Intel running at high speed away from their "enterprise only for the next 5 years" strategy for 64-bit computing. Trouble is, they've spent so much time focusing on "enterprise" platforms with "enterprise" costs intentionally restricted to running only "enterprise" software that it's going to be a struggle for them.
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