chipguy, It is amazing the bad press spin that Intel faces when
selling twice as many chips for nearly ten times more
money is seen as a failure.
Your posts show a lack of perspective. Let me put the comments of the press, OEMs and industry observers into perspective so that they make more sense for you.
You see those being dissapointed by Itanium´s sales. Here are some rough numbers for you:
AMD has 15% of the WW x86 processor market, INTEL has 83%.
INTEL already supplies more than 91% of WW server processors, and more than 93% of x86 server processors.
In Q4 of this year, Itanium was offered by HP, IBM, Dell, SGI, Fujitsu-Siemens, Unisys, BULL, among others.
IBM started offering Opteron servers in what you described as an "odd niche offering" in Q4. Some comparably tiny other server makers also offered Opteron.
Opteron was only introduced in Q2 of 2003, while Itanium has been available from day one and before that, starting with a huge infrastructure, design win, time-to-market [validation!] and credibility advantage (since INTEL is already the NO.1 server processor supplier by a long shot).
I could continue this list forever, but if you can still not understand why Itanium´s progress is considered "dissapointing", while Opteron´s traction, after setting the industry standard for x86 based 64-bit volume server computing, is considered a surprise success, well, I can´t help it. Your very recent prediction that HP would not adopt Opteron, and your disbelief even when it was basically already clear that they´d do it, just shows that you´re in fact in the same group as those I referred to above. You just don´t realize it.
Q2 will be the first real test of Opteron´s progress, since most server OEMs will finally offer it in that quarter. See you then!
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