Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

I don´t regard Itanium as relevant in the workstation market. I wonder if you´ve seen the latest sales numbers of Itanium workstations? There are many reasons for that. SPEC benchmarketing scores have nothing to do with it.

The reasons are the noteable lack of relevent software six
months ago and the fact that the ASP of IA-64 workstations
was about double RISC workstations and nearly 5x that of
x86 workstations.

However this year will see much larger IA-64 workstation
sales for three significant reasons.

1) The Itanium DP and LV models allow cooler, more
compact and less expensive systems to be offered.
2) There will soon be more than one vendor of IPF
based workstations.

and last but not least

3) more software availability, especially for EDA. Intel
is reportedly switching a lot of its internal design and
development work over to IPF platforms and any EDA
vendor who wants to sell to by far the largest single
consumer of such software has to have an IPF version.