In a desperate attempt to prove they are not the company they once were, Intel throws good money after bad by promising to keep promoting the Itanic. Intel and HP have pledged another $10 billion over 5 years to boost the beleagured processor. Seriously, can't they read the writing on the wall? First Intel gets clobbered by AMD in the desktop retail sector. Second, Dell is seriously considering defecting and shipping AMD chips. Now, they want to keep boosting the Itanic. Acting as if you didn't just hit an iceberg is not going to stop you from sinking.
Think about it. The Itanium was supposed to be the successor to the Pentium. The problem was, it wasn't as fast as expected--especially at running x86 code--and it was really hard to write a compiler for. At one point Microsoft was shipping Itanium versions of its premier Windows XP operating system. Now, it has switched to the AMD64 platform. It still will ship Server for the Itanium, but has reduced the scope of support in that product down to three workloads. that doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
In some ways, it is not amazing that Intel would try to jumpstart this dying beast. It needs something to counter the AMD assault on its home territory and iniatives like VIIV (which no one can pronounce let alone explain) are insufficient. It needs something else. I don't think the Itanium is it though. It is just too different and not sufficiently better for most systems to need it. I predict that the x86 will continue to move upstream and Risc/Epic chips will become less and less useful. Another $10 billion is another $10 billion lost.
-Godshatter