Charts: Mining Itanium

Initial predictions for Intel's high-end server chip lost steam as the years passed.

By Bill Detwiler, Editor in Chief, TechRepublic on July 20, 2006

1 of 4 Bill Detwiler/ZDNet

Dwindling Itanium forecasts

Sun Microsystems and IBM, whose processors compete with Intel's Itanium, lace marketing presentations with charts that show how analyst firms' Itanium server revenue forecasts gradually changed from bullish to more conservative, predicting lower and later sales as the years went by.

This chart shows IDC's forecasts of customer spending on Itanium machines as well as the comparatively tiny actual spending in 2004.

For example, in June 2000 (light green line) IDC predicted that Itanium server revenue would gradually climb to $25 billion by 2004.

2 of 4 Bill Detwiler/ZDNet

Itanium servers rank fourth

Among servers shipped with high-end processors in the third quarter of 2005, many more carried UltraSparc or Power chips than Itanium.

Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC chip, which Itanium was designed to supplant, still is used more often.

At 1.7 million, shipments of servers using lower-end x86 chips far outpace those of servers with higher-end chips.

3 of 4 Bill Detwiler/ZDNet

Racking up revenue

Sales of servers with IBM's Power chip brought in 2.7 times more revenue than those with Intel's Itanium in the third quarter of this year.

4 of 4 Bill Detwiler/ZDNet

Customer spending

The amount of customer spending on Itanium servers as a percentage of customer spending on machines with rival products from Sun Microsystems and IBM.

Two years after Itanium launched, servers with the processor started making gains compared with those rival high-end products, according to figures from the chip's manufacturer Intel and research firm IDC.

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