Re: Year of the Itanium

From: John Smith (a_at_nonymous.com)
Date: 12/10/03 

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:00:39 GMT

mist dragon wrote:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/34405.html

Oh what the hell....here's the text...looks like we can expect more
defensive bristling from the HP apologists - but hey, when you burn your
boats behind you, you can only pray like hell that you made the correct
decision.

To quote the Sound of Music ...'So long, farewell, auf weidersehn, goodbye.
Goodbye. Goodbye Goodbye.'

------------------------------------------

Intel toasts Itanium's success by giving servers away
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Posted: 08/12/2003 at 22:53 GMT

Intel has declared 2003 "The Year of Itanium" and then backed up this bold
statement with a server give-away program.

It's rare that a vendor kicks off a free trial program for one of its most
successful, rapidly selling products, but that's exactly what Intel has
done. Aptly dubbed "The Intel Itanium 2 Solution Challenge," the new program
allows Global 500 customers who have RISC-based systems to use an Itanium 2
server and related services for up to 90 days for a gratis kit evaluation.

"We are bullish on the Itanium 2 processor's performance and price advantage
versus proprietary offerings," said Lisa Graff, director of Intel's Itanium
Group. "Intel, along with our industry partners, wants CIOs to experience
the difference an Itanium 2 architecture-based server can make."

(Proprietary clearly means something else at Intel.)

You might wonder why Global 500 customers have yet to dabble with the
Itanic. After all, this is "The Year of Itanium," and Intel promises that
100,000 chips will be shipped by year end. Honest.

Even a server industry novice can tell that Itanic is the pride of Intel's
processor fleet. Intel gave Itanium a full 40 days to enjoy its position as
processor-of-the-year. For some reason, the company known for aggressive
marketing tactics decided a stealth approach was best for its 64-bit
processor. Just as the year neared its end, Intel unleashed the secret
weapon and backed up the rocketing sales with a giveway program to tempt
actual customers to buy the product. It makes perfect sense.

Any why not be bold? IDC just put out third quarter numbers on the chip,
which showed Itanic is indeed setting records. In Q3, a whopping 4,957
Itanium servers were shipped. That's up from 3,250 in Q2 and 1,963 in Q1.

By contrast, 10,746 Opteron servers were shipped in Q3. That's more in one
quarter than Intel shipped so far this year, and it's not even the year of
Opteron. That's also twice as many Opteron boxes as shipped in Q2.

Let's also compare this figures to another relative 64-bit newcomer - Sun
Microsystems' UltraSPARC IIIi. This processor took just about as long as
Itanic to come to market and has been on sale for but two quarters.

Only counting two of Sun's products with the chip, Sun shipped more than
24,000 of its V210 and V240 servers. Over two quarters, that means Sun has
out-shipped the entire Itanium ecosystem by about 2.5x and done so with just
two servers. And this is a struggling company, just like AMD.

If you're a software maker looking for volume sales, "The Year of Itanium"
may not be a major celebration for you.

A lot of people will argue that Intel is selling large SMPs, which makes
processor and system sales different beasts. Following that line of
reasoning, take Intel's own number of 100,000 processors for the entire
year. Through three quarters, Intel has shipped close to 10,000 servers,
according to IDC, which puts the processor per server count at about 10.
With more server sales in Q4, that number will fall. We're talking midrange
kit - at best.

In addition, HP accounts for more than 90 percent of the Itanium market and
only this quarter rolled out 8 and 16 way systems. We suspect the vast
majority of sales are for one and two processor systems - boxes similar to
the V210 and V240.

If year 12 of the Itanium project was its finest showing to date, you can
only imagine how well lucky 13 will go.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Register and Gartner on Itanium sales
    ... HP's transition from PA-RISC to Itanium is gloom & doom, ... The sales increase is stunning - the loss is also stunning. ... server maker suffered through the period as the only Tier 1 unable to post ... Sun and Dell - the oddest couple - led the revenue charge. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: HP exodus to Intel
    ... that played a major role in developing several models of the Itanium ... Intel will handle all future development for the Itanium line. ... nor the number of H-P employees who will ... the future technical foundation for three different H-P server lines. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • 4 months old but still relevant
    ... Itanium server sales are coming in just as expected, ... revenue mark halfway through 2004. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Intel Article in Business Week Magazine
    ... Goodbye To The Chip Of The Future? ... Itanium server chip they had jointly developed three years ago, ... He announced that Intel will ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • The Register and Gartner on Itanium sales
    ... Most of HP's woes appear to have resulted from flagging high-end server sales, as some customers side with Itanium, while others move to IBM and Sun Microsystems. ...
    (comp.os.vms)