Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

Doug, that just isn't realistic (at all) -

If HP does cancel new Itanium sales mid-year, that will certainly accelerate Itanic's demise.

HP has three major product lines just about converted to Itanium - Tandem, Compaq Alpha Unix servers and HP PA-RISC Unix servers. Do you have any idea how much work and time is required to change architecture on these machines? If you decide this year that Itanium is not the future for your company then by 2009 you can start having new product in the new architecture. These aren't PC servers, they require continuity and specialized software.

Even if you decide this year that Itanium is not the preferred architecture, you cannot start changing anyhow. You just dragged your customer base through a wrenching conversion to Itanium (from PA-RISC, Alpha and mips), losing many customers to Power (IBM). Making a move away from Itanium would effectively drive the rest of your customers into the waiting arms of IBM.

Another thing you are forgetting - why is HP using Opteron? Not to replace Itanium, I assure you, but to protect it. It is not in HP's interest for Itanium to become a commodity architecture. Rather, it is in their interest to keep Itanium high end & exclusive, charging lots of money for these systems. Moving the Xeon market to Itanium is the last thing that HP needs, so they need an answer for that market. That answer is Opteron.

I've been posting that position since last April. I consistantly said that it would be in HP's interest to adopt Opteron, just as soon as the production can support it, to protect their Itanium position. This view was disliked by both Intel and AMD fans - the Intel fans thought that HP would want to migrate Itanium everywhere, the AMD fans thought that using Opteron to protect Itanium margins was strange, to say the least.

Well, I called it and gave the reasons. Now the first quarter that AMD Opteron production can support bringing HP aboard, guess what? They are aboard.

No, this reinforces their Itanium strategy. HP is the one systems house where Itanium has a long, long future.