Itanium ... where?

The Inquirer points to an interesting fact: Itanium shined thru absence on this years IDF.The whole Itanium story looks like a collection of maybes.

First off, Itanium. It has been relegated to the niche of high availability, maybe Poulson will change this, maybe it won't, but until then, times are going to be tough. This was clearly (not) stated in the keynotes, I attended five of the six, and the word Itanium was not mentioned once.

At the end the further development of x86 (or x64 to be exact) closed the market for high-end Itanium processors. It can’t execute x86 reasonably well and the software support ist not even near the Power/AIX range. Thus besides of highly specialized tasks there is no real market for the processor. The question ist: How long Intel will pay for a project, that started with high hopes it wasn’t able to fullfil.