Not true, says Intel chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger. "Our Itanium position doesn't change one bit," he says. Yes, some heavy-duty users of computer-aided design software, Adobe Photoshop, and Alias video-editing suites will benefit from being able to address more memory than the 4-Gbyte limit currently imposed by x86. But Intel's mode-switching chips "don't attack enterprise-class apps," Gelsinger says. "Memory addressability is one feature, but Itanium offers more security, fault tolerance, bigger caches, and higher-memory bandwidth."
For many customers, though, cost trumps features. The U.S. Army last week said it's buying a high-performance 2,132-computer cluster from Linux Networx that uses Intel Xeon chips with the 64-bit extensions. "The size of the system comes out based upon the amount of money we have available," says Charles Nietubicz, the acting deputy director at the Army Research Laboratory.
Dell, HP, IBM, and Unisys last week said they'll sell systems with Intel's new design, but the vendors are hedging their bets. IBM and Sun Microsystems sell AMD's Opteron systems, and HP says it remains an option.
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