chipguy, HPQ is moving everything that isn't a PC or a printer to Itanium. While I forgot to mention Superdome, it is certainly being moved also. We agree on this point, actually, I expect Itanium to have a nice niche in higher end commercial servers.
Essentially, Itanium is to HPQ as Sparc is to Sun. Looking ahead five years I expect Itanium to be essentially an HPQ product, in fact if not fully in name.
I also expect Intel to respond to the Opteron challenge with a 64-bit processor of their own, maybe AMD64 compatible, maybe not. The real question is whether AMD will be able to build enough server presence to split the market evenly with Intel, or whether Intel will get their 64-bit x86 out there soon enough to stave off AMD. If they insist on a NIH attitude (making their own bus to compete with aHT and their own instruction set) then it will take them a lot longer. Intel's best response is to license AMD64 and aHT (which AMD has repeatedly said they are willing to discuss).
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