Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[bobs10]

MSFT tires of Itanium?

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2598

Them...

As the Itanium market is still limited to HPC and (ultra) high-end servers, Microsoft is losing interest in the Itanium. IA 64 versions of Longhorn are low priority and only the future of the High Performance Computing version for Itanium seems certain. Visual Studio 2005 does not even support the Itanium platform. Dell and IBM are no longer interested. It is not going too well for Itanium.

Although the AMD Opteron targets a different market than the Intel Itanium, the Opteron market is expanding towards the high end, thanks to Sun, which in turn forces Intel to expand the feature set of the Xeon. Back in 2004 when EM64T was introduced, Intel pointed out that EM64T was only introduced on the Xeon DP. Intel probably expected the Opteron to be limited to workstations and entry level servers. However, the Opteron was very successful in the quad CPU market, and then it entered the 8-way and 16-way CPU market too. Intel had no choice then to counter attack and equip the Xeon MP with EMT64 and much higher clockspeeds than before the Opteron era, better RAS features and massive (for x86) L3 caches, up to 8MB big.

Me...

Just wait until Horus and Pathscale get going. Itanium and big Iron in general are going to be feeling a lot of pain. Not something that will happen overnight, but that's not what we want anyways. As slow a death as possible would be the best outcome for AMD stockholders. Let's hope, like a big fat leach, Itanium continues to drain the lifeblood out of INTC for a long time.