HP 'jilts Intel Itanium'

By Steve Malone

Posted on 27 Sep 2004 at 09:25

Intel's biggest customer for its Itanium processor is to stop building workstations built around the chip according to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Hewlett Packard is rumoured to have dropped the chip in favour of concentrating on IA-64 based machines.

If true, the move will be seen as a serious blow to the Itanium which has struggled for some time to gain the kind of market acceptance that was expected of it. Arriving late in 2001, the chip never really took off. Whilst offering all the advantages of a 64-bit architecture the software for the workstation market just hasn't appeared.

The move is doubly significant as HP helped to develop the Itanium in the first place. Dropping the chip will be seen as a bit of loss of face for a company already struggling in the face of fierce competition in the workstation market against IBM and Sun.

Instead, HP is reported to be adopting the AMD Opteron wholeheartedly. Its ability to run IA-32-bit and 64-bit apps together is seen as the way to go by many companies who don`t want to have to support several operating systems and flavours of application and HP seems to be thinking along the same lines. The move signals another step in HP's road to streamlining its range of processors. In August HP unveiled its last Alpha chip for the HP GS 1280 server.

If HP does drop the Itanium from its workstation ranges, it will be another blow to Intel who is having a difficult year. A combination of product recalls, missed targets, a competitor which now seems to be setting the agenda and now a vote of no-confidence by one of the leading manufacturers, has taken the shine from one of tech`s golden stocks.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Itanium was never really important for workstations, which will raise some eyebrows amongst those who have been listening to Intel's sales pitch over the years.