"This is better than 3DNow," said Mike Fister, general manager of Intel's server group, referring to the AMD multimedia extensions in Athlon and Opteron.
"The big databases have already been converted over to Itanium, and they will be on Itanium forever," Fister added.
"IBM solutions, based on Intel's new Xeon with 64-bit extensions, will provide customers a seamless transition to the next generation of enterprise computing, while protecting their existing infrastructure investments," said Susan Whitney, General Manager, IBM eServer xSeries. "IBM will incorporate Intel's 64-bit extension technology, when it becomes available, into our products."
Analysts said they expect Itanium to have a long future, despite its rather narrow new positioning. Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.) said Intel ultimately could capture with Itanium up to 2.5 million sockets/year in high-end servers. By contrast, Sun Microsystems' Sparc processor probably only ships about one million units a year, he estimated.
Barrett said Intel sold about 110,000 Itaniums in 2003 and is ramping up. Intel and HP once hoped the Itanium line would be the successor to the x86 which goes into more than 100 million systems a year.
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