When Intel decides to drop Itanium is anyone's guess. Officially, the company still has two future implementations on the roadmap. Poulson, tentatively planned for 2012, is a 32nm Itanium with more cores (at least 8), multithreading enhancements, and additional instructions. After that comes Kittson, which is due out in 2014. Since Intel has been consistently tardy on its Itanium releases, those dates could slip substantially. Or Intel could pull the plug sooner if its success with the Nehalem EX and the future Westmere EX shrinks the demand for Itanium business beyond redemption.
What an amazing amount of FUD recycling mascarading
as tech journalism over the past few weeks. Once a meme
gets into the sheep flock it goes around and around. It
saves them the apparently painful effort of thinking. One
of the more particularly dull sheep, Andy Patrizio, even
pointed to the fact that IPF sales "have been slipping.
Last year they fell 20 percent, from $5 billion to $4
billion.". Uh hello? Global recession, ever heard of it
moron? Total server sales dropped 19% last year.
I don't know how many times self-appointed experts in the
press have killed off IPF over the past 8 years but during
that time a total of about $25B worth of IPF systems have
been sold. IPF sales have grown past SPARC, Opteron,
and z into third place behind Xeon and Power. I haven't
seen any stories about when AMD will pull the plug on
Opteron or when IBM will pull the plug on mainframes.
Oh well. Like the old expression goes the best revenge is
to live well. HP introduces its new generation of Tukwila
based servers on April 27. Unless of course IPF is sud-
denly cancelled before then. :-D
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