Elmer, UpNDown, on HP, Compaq & Itanium: Your discussion misses a couple of important points. HP is codeveloper and co-owner of Itanium, and Compaq is part of HP. In other words, they don't need Intel in order to keep developing Itanium as their high end product.
Something that I post occasionally but no one seems to get it: HP does not want Itanium on the desktop, they want A64 or similar. They want product differentiation between high-end Itanium servers, vs. desktop & low-end server x86-64 (they don't really care if it is AMD64 or something Intel provides). Desktop Itanium would totally disrupt their business model, which depends on clear product differentiation between the PC business and the big iron business.
This is where Intel and HP part ways, strategically. Intel always desired for Itanium to push down to the desktop. That is the last thing that HP needs.
Now, history doesn't provide one example of a processor that started as high-end and successfully pushed down to the desktop, so HP will probably win out. That victory will come in the form of Intel providing x86-64, be it AMD's version or their own. I think that Barrett's comments in the last CC (which, in total, kind of ignored Itanium and opened the possibility of an unspecified desktop 64-bits) is the first step in Intel's repositioning Itanium's future to meet the needs of its most important customer, HP.
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