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IBM to Drop Itanium
Hack Jandy writes "Xbitlabs is reporting that IBM chose not to persue Itanium in their next generation server lineup because of the "market acceptance issues" of the platform. They will still continue with new revisions of Xeon servers, however. With IBM's investments in Power, I can't help but think the writing was already on the wall. The article also hints that IBM might start using Power in their high end server products."
What? IBM already uses POWER in it's high-end server products. What do you think they develop it for, anyway?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
What IBM has decided not to do is support the Montecito IA64 chips. Apparently Intel initially approached IBM about licensing the X3 technology for an chipset to support Montecito, IBM agreed and shut down their own program to develop a chipset and redeployed the resources, Intel came back a few weeks later and said they had changed their mind, would IBM build an X3 chipset for Montecito but by this point they had also announced that the next post-Montecito Itanium chip would be plug compatible with Xeon. Hence the market opportunity for Montecito is about 18 months so it's not worth IBM's effort to build a chipset for only that time.
IBM has therefore decided to continue to sell the existing x455 servers through this year, skip Montecito and support Itanium again with X3 when it becomes plug compatible with Xeon. That means that for about a year they will have no server that will support Itanium.
Two years is a long time in this business so who knows if anyone outside of the HP/UX install base will care about Itanium by then but IBM does have a plan for continued IA64 support if current trends continue.
This is not good news for Itanium but it's also not a complete cancellation.