Intel Corp (INTC)

[spokeshave]

wbmw: That depends. Do you happen to have the volumes for the first year that MIPS was launched? How about Alpha? PowerPC? x86?

No, I don't. I am not sure that I see the relevance, though, aside from the fact that all of the examples you presented represent new architectures. I would hazard a guess that all of the examples you listed shipped more than thousands of units in the first year. I am fairly confident that Alpha, PowerPC and x86 (I assume that you mean the 8086) all shipped hundreds of thousands or even millions in the case of PowerPC and 8086 in the first year. PowerPC integrated instantly into an existing consumer product (The Mac) and the 8086 was released into the first IBM desktops.

However, none of the above examples typifies the introduction of Itanium. Itanium was a new product for a *huge* existing market, but the product had a catch. It would not run any existing software well. Intel did not sell many Itaniums in the last year and a half because there has been very little industry acceptance to date.